MYMUP/EID111
Design, Illusion and
Reality
Fall 1998
BRIDGES - links, machines, metaphors and snyapses
COURSE DESCRIPTION
There is much that we can do in our work as engineers, artists and architects to restore the necessary constructive connection between humankind and nature.
In a future of links and nodes generated by ones and zeros, it is the link, the transition between a given "here" and "there" which will deeply affect any such constructive connection.
In this, a small but vital step is to see the design process as a collaborative one between many branches of human activity as a whole and not as a matter of watertight compartments arbitrarily contrived with a bare minimum of communicative intelligence bridging them.
By taking a variety of particular examples of pre-existing bridges that are products of engineering, art and architecture, students will glimpse how the design processes are initiated and how the subsequent available options are resolved. The emphasis will be on synthesis, rather than analysis, of the approach to problem solving.
Students will conduct and document the design process of a site specific bridge; that site will be actual or conceptual.