This contribution is intended to explore and discuss the impacts and potentials of different modes of visual communication in architecture by considering it as an issue of design.
How we communicate different kinds of formal conceptions and findings has a profound impact upon own understanding as well as that of the other involved parties we may be addressing.
To illustrate and illuminate the shifting opportunities for imaginative visualisation in the context of practice, education and research the paper identifies four case studies. Each of these is considered to be exemplary of a Thesis, which is considered briefly in a Discussion section in order to underline
the ‘design’ aspects of design-based communication.        

Designing Design Communication (PDF, 7Mb)

As the disciplines of architecture involve the – projective and/or reflective – scrutiny and investigation of spatial concepts and structures that are not easily captured and conveyed imaginatively with words, designers and scholars of architecture are inclined to resort to visual modes of communication.
Design-based imaging stimulates the sharing of information, offering different ‘actors’ in the design- or research process at hand conditioned insights into the subject matter, triggering individual and collective understandings.
Such ‘visualisations’ tend to stimulate intellectual and/or emotional responses and lead to targeted (re)actions, which in turn may influence and even alter the composition or conception of the architectural entity under consideration.
This bias towards visual modes of expression is arguably characteristic of architectural Practice and increasingly of design Research, but perhaps most significantly: the ‘in-between realm’ of design Education…
The representational instrument that is frequently given a prominent status is the architectural Drawing, which is sometimes attributed an almost mythical status. Another ‘leading medium’ is undoubtedly the architectural Model, which in particular ways can be perceptually even more appealing than the drawing.
In recent years the traditional distinction between these two fundamental ‘means of communication’ has increasingly become blurred, with the evolvement of various ‘crossover media’, such as digital 3D model ‘sketching’ and physical modelling involving digital manufacturing platforms. Design communication devices such as these tend to incorporate attributes of traditional modelling as well as drawing, whereby the emphasis may shift from the picturesque to the symbolic, from the analytical to the conceptual.
The (inter)active utilisation of design media has become an intrinsic condition of the method in design driven enquiry, whether the focus of study is generating ‘form’ or understanding the workings of design artefacts.
The intention of this papers is to explore the currently shifting design communication paradigms and discuss the opportunities of contemporary modelling approaches – physical as well as digital – for the benefit of architectural exploration, focusing on a case-based study carried out in an educational environment: the AA Variations project.

The Model as the Method (PDF, 4Mb)

Conference paper