The aim of this course is to explore the relation between design, materials, and making.

Driven by the profusion of building materials and components, by the requirements to comply with building regulation authorities, by the threat of legal action, and by the shortage of time, architects often resort to applying standard construction details to their design concepts, regardless of whether or not these ‘copy & paste’ details fit or enhance their design ideas.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with using the plethora of construction information readily available to architects. But all too often ready-made details are used with only partial understanding of the reasons why they were put together in a particular way and the contexts in which their application is appropriate.

This course starts from the premise that in order to fully understand how to design building details it is necessary to have a direct sensory experience of the materials being used. Juhani Pallasmaa makes a similar point in his book The Eyes of the Skin (p.10)

“I had become increasingly concerned about the bias towards vision, and the suppression of other senses in the way architecture was conceived, taught and critiqued, and about the consequent disappearance of sensory and sensual qualities from the arts and architecture.”

When Louis Kahn asked  “What does a brick want to be?”, he was rhetorically calling attention to the relation between material properties and design,

"You say to a brick, 'What do you want, brick?' And brick says to you, 'I like an arch.' And you say to brick, 'Look, I want one, too, but arches are expensive and I can use a concrete lintel.' And then you say: 'What do you think of that, brick?' Brick says: 'I like an arch.'"