½éÉÜ£º For Ursula and all the other generous friends, both near and far, professional andnon-professional, who have given me so much encouragement over the years. Architectural Press An imprint of Elsevier Linacre House, Jordan Hill, Oxford OX2 8DP 30 Corporate Drive, Burlington, MA 01803 First published 2004 Copyright © 2004, Chris Abel. All rights reserved The right of Chris Abel to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Contemporary architecture is going through an exciting period of experimentation.However, many architects seem to be repeating the same dreadful mistakes that our twentieth-century predecessors have made. Architecture¨Ctechnology relationships are commonly over-simplified and many designers who are apparently working at the cutting edge are in reality still glaringly conventional in how they actually use and conceptualize technology. Current architectural theories have also been slow to catch up with the newfound morphological freedom that is offered by digital technology. Designers enamoured with their new tools are frantically casting about in search of a theoretical framework or any kind of hook with which they can make sense of the boundless shapes and geometries that their computers enable them to generate. A multitude of competing ideologies add to the confusion of the times, making life more difficult for architects as well as creating new opportunities. Busy professionals no less than neophyte designers concerned with the art of architecture and how to produce it, are all struggling to position themselves, a task which by its nature entails a rigorous process of self-examination. Added to these issues is the question of what knowledge base architecture should be founded on? What is the fundamental knowledge that we architects possess? In architecture, we find that, while the need to know originates in one discipline, the required knowledge itself often belongs to many others. How can we work from principles when what we do is produce artefacts? How do we take knowledge from another discipline, and adapt it to our own? In the past, our approach has been one of extension. We inclusively expanded the range of our discipline to encompass other fields. Architectural education began to require more and more knowledge that was inherent to or borrowed from other disciplines. At the same time, many of these disciplines were themselves also rapidly expanding their own knowledge base and independently advancing their own theoretical bodies, creating further problems of assimilation. The more we extend, the more we are also forced to trade off knowledge for data, exchanging theoretical concepts for ¡®hard facts¡¯. As a result, architects