APPLIED TECHNOLOGY IN EDUCATION: PARAMETRIC DESIGN TO FOSTER IDENTITARIAN STRATEGIES

Due to the nature of Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche, México, as an island of strategic importance because of its oil exploitation-exploration dynamic at the marine site located in the area known as Sonda de Campeche, it became crucial to educate professionals of architecture committed and respectful to the environment and sensitive to the needs and demands of the social context, willing to promote the development of society harmoniously with the ecosystem.

After months of planning, the first generation of Sustainable architecture or Arquitectura sustentable finally joined the school in August 2013. When the first generation of students reached the fourth semester of the career program they demanded to study a subject that linked the modeling of structures in 3D with the design of architectural elements to promote sustainability and equilibrium with their surroundings, therefore the subject known as Diseño Paramétrico or Parametric Design was taught in the summer academic period of July 2015, during an interval of four weeks known as “intersemestral”, dedicated to focus on the identified weaknesses of our students and strengthen their skills in the opportunity areas.

As part of this subject’s program the instructor designed a task that aimed to follow the given algorithmic sequences and propose their own, later on, to design architectural elements through the tools provided by “Rhino”, a parametric design program. From a designed structure previously analyzed and worked in class, students created a model in scale to physically pre-visualize the behavior of the structure in space and the challenges that they would face to build it in human scale. Once this was done, each student was in charge of a limited number of the wooden pieces that made up the structure in real scale -they cut and sanded every single piece. The final step aimed to request the link of architecture with the structural calculus tools offered by engineering to build the passageway structure.

The task also stressed that translating what had been virtually designed into a human scale passageway structure demanded their intellectual and physical work and their bodily experience to materialize their effort as a school community. It was outlined that as future professionals involved with the design of space they are expected to involve and commit intellectually, emotionally and physically with their everyday surroundings.

This academic exercise aimed to bond the students with the designed structures, to unveil a new understanding and transcend the virtually conceived proposals. It also focused on stimulating the students’ attention to the details that weave our daily experience, it is not common for us as human beings to reflect on spaces that are others different from our own body space that invite us to orient ourselves as inhabitants of our daily environment through different sensorial markers not always activated or alert.

As instructors and researchers from opposite extreme disciplines such as social studies, architecture and structural calculus, it has not been easy to dialogue and harmonize our perspectives, but we were finally able to reach a meaningful point of coincidence and that is what we want students to sense and materialize in a structure that translates the meaning of the dialogue of the multiple voices that integrate our community.