Buchanan, Foster, la Ingeniería en el Siglo XXI y el Valor del Trabajo en Equipo

“…For instance, the Swiss Re building - although still a glacially forbidding, stand-alone modernist work – was designed using parametric modelling to achieve new levels of efficiency in structure (20 per cent less steel than an equivalent tower) and energy use. As Spanish critic Luis Fernández-Galiano reminds us in Fire and Memory, architecture involves construction and combustion: buildings have energy-consuming metabolisms that heat, cool and ventilate them, and their materials are manufactured in various other metabolic processes.
Other computer-dependent techniques were used to design Swiss Re. These include Computational Fluid Dynamics to model climatic conditions inside and out, and Space Syntax axial analysis to check whether the square would be used. Yet none of these contemporary concerns, let alone the core discipline of construction, are discussed in Schumacher’s supposedly comprehensive and ultimately anachronistic theory of architecture.
Swiss Re also draws attention to more of its weaknesses, not least the exaggeration of the degree to which, in becoming a progressively more autonomous functional system, architecture has diverged from engineering. In practices at the leading edge of architecture (something very different to the avant-garde), engineers play a key role in the design team. This includes not only structural engineers but also, with the quest for sustainability, services engineers. In the near future, it will involve production engineers, who will be redesigning the manufacturing processes of materials and components to make them less energy-intensive and polluting. As contemporary parlance puts it, we have moved from the Age of Genius (of the solitary master creator) to the Age of Scenius. Creation now happens in inter-disciplinary teams, in which everyone contributes as (more or less) equals. Moreover, the architect of Swiss Re is the hardly avant-garde Foster + Partners, winner of a recent poll in Building Design magazine as the most influential of all architectural practices…”
The Architectural Review. Peter Buchanan
The Autopoiesis of Architecture dissected, discussed and decoded, 4 March 2011(extracto)
Seleccionado por el arq. Martín Lisnovsky