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Process is more important than product

TheHiddenStep

Hi everyone, first post!

I'm doing some research on 'process is more important than product' in design. I've looked up writings by John Cage, Nox, Reiser + Umemoto, Brian Eno, Greg Lynn etc but was wondering if there was anyone else that has talked at length about this?

Are there any firms that particularly idolize/resist this methodology, or are there any built projects that show interesting characteristics from such a design strategy? There are people using material systems and elements of chance etc, alongside the flood of parametric and emergence stuff. Quite interesting ways of creating new architecture.



 
Sep 2, 09 7:02 pm
poop876

Have you tried Eisenman? Look at his book Diagram Diaries with intro by Bob Somol....very good book!

Sep 3, 09 3:29 am  · 
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starrchitect

"Process is more important than product"

Try telling that to the bank.

Sep 3, 09 12:35 pm  · 
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binary

no product...then it's pointless

Sep 3, 09 1:30 pm  · 
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dia

Yes, look at Eisenman and Zaera-Polo's writing on Eisenman. There are some excellent pieces found in Eisenman's El Croquis.

And from Bruce Mau's 'An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth':

3. Process is more important than outcome
When the outcome drives the process we will only go to where we’ve already been. If process drives the outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there

Sep 3, 09 5:53 pm  · 
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dia

Also, have a look here for a broader POV:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/

Sep 3, 09 5:55 pm  · 
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IamGray

"There are people using material systems and elements of chance etc, alongside the flood of parametric and emergence stuff"

It's interesting that you mention the two ideas (chance vs. parametric) as opposed entities, as just the other day I was reading a book on the work of Cecil Balmond / AGU, where he suggests that mathematical "logic" is precisely one way to reintroduce "chance" back into the equation. According to Balmond, the average person reverts back to previously seen patters when attempting to create something "random". By starting with a geometric foundation however, something different is uncovered, and the opportunity for randomness is increased.

Mind you, I'm doing a terrible job paraphrasing... But I definitely recommend you look up his work, as I think it would prove interesting and fruitful to your research regardless.

Sep 3, 09 6:14 pm  · 
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TheHiddenStep

Thanks very much to diabase and poop876 for the great replies! I'm finding lots of new inspiration already. Anyone else have any more advice/comments about this?

Sep 3, 09 7:12 pm  · 
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Jah is my Co-pilot

Somewhat related...

Steven Johnson - "Emergence"
Read this:

Sep 3, 09 7:17 pm  · 
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chatter of clouds

sex is more important than procreation?
certainly its meant to be more fun.

i suspect that there is more to it than this though:

1- how do you define 'importance', why decide to assign importance in the forst place and to whom is the process more important than the product.

2- could there be processes were there no products?

3- how do you strictly distinguish process from product? i ask this because from one viewpoint, the product..like a score, since you refer to composers as well...is itself, post authoring and after the fact, still an internal processing of its own sounds and themes. experiencing a finalized building (rather than designing it), similarly, is a commonsensical processing of spaces...the score, metaphorical in this case, is the functional program in the least and could extent to sensory-somatic structures designed into the building.

assigning more importance to process over product is akin, though not exactly the same as, assigning more importance to cause over effect. i believe thats a pseudo-science. nature is not about the 'importance of process'; process is necessitated and inevitable not "important" nor glamorous. process is the product of the interface between different and similair products. therefore the words process or product are merely loopholes into each other.

Sep 4, 09 2:09 am  · 
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Dikor

Try "The Architecture of Rasem Badran: Narratives on People and Place " written by Rasem Badran and James Steel.
Badran is a jordan architect who is obsessed by the process which lead to a product that is based on many conceptual backgrounds.
the book illustrates his process and many case studies illustrating the apllication of his process.
You can search for the book on rapidshare..guess it was there.

Sep 4, 09 5:01 am  · 
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"Does our obsession with process and problem solving exist because we would rather establish a clear and repeatable working method than continually face the proverbial blank sheet of paper? Does it exist because process is easier and quicker to teach than precedent? Or because discussing the processes of "research architecture" in design gives us something to talk about in reviews, or something convincing to say to clients? Is it so that, as with Abstract Expressionism, we can forgo painterly dexterity in favor of the will to discover? Have we, in fact, ordained process, research, and analysis as some architectural version of the Jonas Brothers--an unchallenged design anthem to be broadcast on all channels at all times and for any reason--in order to avoid confronting a line that lacks a legitimate rationale?"
--Mark Foster Gaga, "In Defense of Design" in Log 16 (Spring/ Summer 2009).




Sep 4, 09 10:29 am  · 
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poop876

Fondue,
I do agree with you about assigning more importance to one or the other. Both of them are important and one can't be without the other for a successful project.

How many projects are out there that are...well....'cool' projects but that is all they are, they are cool, but they could be very good projects if they had a process supporting it.

On the other side, why have the process if the product is unimportant, and a successful product is what we are looking for on the end.

The reason I suggested Eisenman (he's not the only one), is because he is very serious when it comes to diagrams, process, analysis in order to come to the final product. Same thing with Frank Gehry! His product can be traced back to a start of a single line, which is being manipulated (process) to come to the final product.

Sep 4, 09 10:30 am  · 
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bRink

Here's my 2 cents...

Process needs a life line back to reality at some point in order to have any meaning for *real people*... in order to be architecture that has importance outside of being objects of being art pieces or things in galleries and in art books... Architecture that is *useful*...

If the process can take you way out into outerspace or cyberspace or orbiting someplace, it *might or might not* be valuable... And that does depend on the *end result*.... Whether that process allows you to discover something new *that is useful*, that you wouldn't have come to without it... It's valuable to discover something new... but only if when it gets brought back down to earth, the end result is executed in a way where we can all look at it and marvel at the innovation of it and we can all *get it*, and it makes sense and is remarkable... otherwise it's in outer space and without some kind of connection back to the earth, it'll drift off into oblivion... :P

I think the trick is still in the exeution of the end result... that's imho the hard part.... without it, without the follow through and the willingness to do the hard work to make it something real, it ends up conceptual art, and *not architecture*...

Sep 4, 09 11:20 am  · 
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bRink

which is not to say that conceptual art is not important, or whether it is more or less important than architecture, but conceptual art that is spacial is not necessarily architecture...

Sep 4, 09 11:31 am  · 
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farwest1

Mark Foster Gage's comment seems to be a pop-psychological justification for his own hyperbaroque, site-insensitive form making (what Steven Holl calls "making salad.")

If anyone elevates Jonas Brothers-esque style over substance, it's him.

Sep 4, 09 11:38 am  · 
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Just for clarity's sake, care to provided examples of site-sensitive form-making.

The gist of Gage's essay overall speaks of precedence and intuition as a seemingly forgotten or overlooked part of the design process. What Gage's essay does not have is any illustration of what precedence and intuition within the design process might produce. Judging his firm's work in light of the essay may indeed be (further) revealing.

Sep 4, 09 12:06 pm  · 
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vado retro

Is it so that, as with Abstract Expressionism, we can forgo painterly dexterity in favor of the will to discover?--wtf? since when does nonfigurative painting mean a forgoing of painterly dexterity? and what is the Jonas Brothers?

Sep 4, 09 1:05 pm  · 
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what I really want to hear is Gage's justification for the Valentine to Times Square installation.

Sep 4, 09 1:18 pm  · 
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Distant Unicorn

Oh man, I'm totally hungover right now.

Anyways, I was just having an excellent BM. Process was definitely more enjoyable than product.

Sep 4, 09 1:32 pm  · 
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process as discovery?
process as justification?
process as catharsis?





a small reenactment of
Process Taking Its Own Shape
1983



1. Conceptual sketch . . . Beginnings



2. Parti



3. Schematics



4. Design development



5. Working drawings . . . vacation



6. Construction



7. Built work



8. History . . . the final product

Sep 4, 09 3:28 pm  · 
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Cacaphonous Approval Bot
bwahahahaa
Sep 4, 09 4:44 pm  · 
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binary


l.woods

Sep 4, 09 4:55 pm  · 
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b3tadine[sutures]


site sensitive form making??

Sep 4, 09 5:56 pm  · 
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farwest1

The Valentine to Times Square by Gage/Clemenceau is to architecture what Liberace was to music.

Sep 4, 09 6:26 pm  · 
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If Spiral Getty is used as a gauge for site sensitive form making, then it still isn't altogether clear how Gage's work is site insensitive form making.

Sep 4, 09 6:39 pm  · 
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farwest1

I don't think Spiral Jetty is site sensitive. Site responsive, maybe. But as an artwork, it's sort of exempt from the same pressures we put on architecture.

Sep 4, 09 7:24 pm  · 
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aspect

"Process is more important than product" only applies to self-xxxx experiences...


architecture is about performances.

Sep 4, 09 9:08 pm  · 
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chatter of clouds

The Chilean Cuidad Abierta (open city) might as well be defined as being site-sens-itive. its intentions and achievements consist of framing instances of interface between site elements (wind, sand, light..) and the senses. Architecture there is seen to be an addition to the site in its capacity to frame and exaggerate these instances; architecture as nature’s background so to speak. to the extent that the subliminal and the marginal, are drawn out into a poetic consciousness, architecture becomes an installation of its traditional antithesis, namely nature. The philosophically famed concept of a “clearing” as been reversed: Architecture as the marginal frame and Nature as the actor.

Art , vis architecture, implicating nature, vis the frame, in its artifice; aside from a strictly scientific ecology (and, its linguistic/epistemological counterpart: natural systems taxonomy), site-sensitivity, typically perceived as an aesthetic sensitivity towards nature - and therefore containing within it a sentiment of primordial authenticity and nostalgia- is more a sensitivity towards the virtual colonialization of nature by the artificial. An even purer example of this virtuality is eco-tourism: by merely framing a naturally occurring virgin (as the ultimate extreme) place in a chain of ads, brochures and site-extraneous non-embodied agencies (telephone calls, credit cards, emails, reservation numbers…etc) this place has been subjected to, and brought into, the very center of a taylorized world of labour, machines and capitalism without so much as a machine or office in its sight/on its site.

Sep 5, 09 6:50 am  · 
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chatter of clouds

well, maybe the occasional boat or helicopter.

Sep 5, 09 6:52 am  · 
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b3tadine[sutures]
The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is the focal point of all vision and all consciousness. But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.

i am reading Guy Debord this weekend...

Sep 5, 09 7:51 am  · 
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vado retro

talk about a "labor" day weekend, beta.

Sep 5, 09 10:02 am  · 
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hey zeus

Importance by position in 'Architecture':

The Boss/Self Employed:

1. Performance
2. Product
3. Process

The Paid Employee:

1. Product
2. Perfromance
3. Process

The Student:

1. Process
2. Product
3. Performance

Concentrating on Process alone is quite possibly the dumbest suggestion Academia has came up with as a method for critiquing the profession....if you ever wonder why the really cool firms make now money, or at least the people working, it is because no one is concentrating on the only thing the world cares about - product.

All good archtitecture is a result of surpluss capital, therefore good architecture is a commodity created by service professionals, thus Product will always be more important than process.

try Versioning versus Vision

Sep 5, 09 1:24 pm  · 
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binary

well, we all know that school is a smoke screen anyways....

Sep 5, 09 2:39 pm  · 
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treekiller

Halprin's rsvp cycle is a pre-structuralist process path.

Sep 5, 09 5:53 pm  · 
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aspect

architects like to masturbate on the idea of process becos we are one of the few professionals that can get away with it when our product fails... mainly we do not have a standard yard stick to measure the performances unlike a sports car or banking etc.

Sep 5, 09 10:10 pm  · 
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Distant Unicorn

"we do not have a standard yard stick to measure the performances unlike a sports car or banking etc."

wholesale price per square foot vs retail price per square foot vs fixed costs vs variable costs vs total profit = performance!

most buildings should be designed to produce more than they take. a building that fails to maintain profitability is not successful no matter how beautiful it is or how much architect semen has been spread all over it.

Sep 5, 09 10:27 pm  · 
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b3tadine[sutures]

i masturbate almost daily.

Sep 5, 09 10:30 pm  · 
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Plus read a spectacle this Sontag.

Sep 5, 09 10:36 pm  · 
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b3tadine[sutures]

thank you SL.

Sep 6, 09 2:07 am  · 
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b3tadine[sutures]

on photography and regarding the pain of others look very interesting...

Sep 6, 09 2:23 am  · 
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chatter of clouds

from a more poignant point of view, it could be that the eclipsing of product by process happens in a global culture where perpetual money-making and circulation is the aim and where trying to stay well off, young and eternal is the aim amongst other aims- i.e. where the process is more about product-deferment (ex. making money from getting rid of money and age-defering tactics) than product-production (which happened in a preceding stage). perhaps thats what post- or hyper-capitalism is: when a tangible product becomes too nostalgic a signature of its time and therefore of, by extention as consumers, our imminent death; process liberates the product, or in reality our view of it, from a stolid state of existential (spatio-temporal) stagnation...process allows us to defer ourselves without the morbid burden of memory and from impersonating period-dramas. but at the heraclitean extreme (parmenidean 'eye of the storm'), we need to also need to defer deference itself. the paradox: "constantly in change" can only be resolved in a concept of nothingness where this nothingness means that each entity is an extention of all other entities rather than existing in its own island of being. as such, the concept of process as an individual drama must be overcome as much as the product of that drama is also being overcome.
from the parajnaparamita heart sutra: Hear Shariputra, all dharmas are marked with emptiness; they are neither produced nor destroyed, neither defiled nor immaculate, neither increasing not decreasing. (taken from The Heart of understanding: Commentaries on the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra by Thich Nhat Hanh).

Sep 7, 09 10:23 am  · 
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farwest1

I actually think our culture has abandoned any notion of 'process' in most areas, in favor of shiny new finished products.

Architecture seems to hold on to process as a final bulwark against the encroachment of all-consuming form. We hope (or some of us hope) that architects are not simply decorators making pretty facades for buildings, but rather have something to say about how culture acts and interacts.



Sep 7, 09 10:36 pm  · 
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aspect

we do not provide massage/escort services, process doesn't matter.

Sep 7, 09 11:01 pm  · 
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b3tadine[sutures]

farwest, isn't the "shiny new product" capitalism's version of process? it seems that with the evolution of each product - cars for instance - the shorter the life span, and the more likely we are to replace with a "shiny new product."

Sep 8, 09 5:55 am  · 
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jplourde

I think we are getting our terms mixed.

Also, I don't think you can really separate the two. How is it possible to preference one or the other? Can you have a brilliant product without a fantastic process? Is it possible to have a great process end up in a quagmire?

Of course it is, and that is because ultimately, what matters more than the technique is the content. A series of values and value judgements that inform the core principles of the project or building.

You can fetishize Gehry's linework all you want, but don't forget that everyone from MIT who worked on the Stata Center was fired or resigned. Is that a 'good' process?

Ideally, the 'performance' of the 'product' should be intrinsically related to the 'process.'

Tools are just tools, what matters more is what you intend to do with them.

http://www.rex-ny.com/approach/yale-building-in-the-future-symposium

Sep 8, 09 8:36 am  · 
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not_here

to the OP

taking a few things from my thesis on process, randomness, and automatics... i suggest you read:

caw's themes and movements: surrealism. the section on chance and freedom.
sack's musicophilia's first chapter.
aranda's tooling. but read this with a distant eye. see it as a statement or and observation of current procedural practices and not as content.

an unbounded study of process is gonna lead you to cognitive science, psychology and neuroscience, that is, if you are not like 85% of our profession: far too scared to learn things that don't seem "architectural" at first glance. a lot of the babble you hear in school during full studio crits is silenced by having this sort of knowledge...

you can always turn around and come back with more knowledge than most people in the profession and a bit more awareness of your way of working, even if you aren't prioritizing process in practice.
...and that's definitely worth your time.

Sep 8, 09 8:46 am  · 
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dia

Here's a challenge for you: design a building without a process.

Good luck and I'll see you in a million years.

Sep 8, 09 4:50 pm  · 
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binary

process takes decisions...that of which most folks are not able to do....so the process just continues.......

Sep 8, 09 5:02 pm  · 
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Here's a challenge for you: design a building without a product.

Good luck and I'll see you in a million years.

Sep 8, 09 5:17 pm  · 
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chatter of clouds

Pro+cedere= to go forward. Subject-centric.
Pro+ducere= to bring forth.Object-centric.
The quibble is, lastly, over which side of the verb (depending on the language and phrasing of course) one roots for.Last Tango in Grammar.

Sep 9, 09 12:08 am  · 
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