Research Proposal of Master Degree
Deconstructivismand It’s Difficulties with Architecture’s Students
By
Amatalraoof Abdullah Al Sharafi
Master Candidate in Architecture
December, 2011
Research Topic
Deconstructivismand It’s Difficulties with Architecture’s Students
1. Background Information
During the 21st century, architecture started to take new way of expression both in general form and philosophy. The past few years have seen increasing technological advances in building materials which have more privileged properties such as flexibility,easiness to configuration, elasticity, rigidity, and beauty of appearance. These facilities encourage architects to be more creative in design without fearing of the difficulties that might face them in execution. Actually, because of technology, human mind has become more imaginative and elaborative on his chaos thinking to come up with inspired ideas in every sector. That is what we have touched it through some architects and architecture’s student in their projects .As a result, there are new trend in architecture which is considered as a development of postmodern architecture called deconstructivism . This new movement has been started by Jacques Derrida in 1971. It is characterized by ideas of fragmentation, an interest in manipulating ideas of a structure's surface or skin, non-rectilinear shapes which serve to distort and dislocate some of the elements of architecture, such as structure and envelope. The finished visual appearance of buildings that exhibit the many deconstructivist "styles" is characterized by a stimulating unpredictability and a controlled chaos. (Wikipedia encyclopaedia). Although Jacques Derrida tried to avoid giving special definition of deconstructivism , he declared once in one of his interviews that it is to not naturalize what is not natural , to not assume that what is conditioned by history ,institutions ,or society is natural.
This kind of architecture has been criticised by numerous architects who have made many complaints about it, however; it has become the most popular and attractive to the most of the people. Many deconstructive projects have taken place in the world and have good reputation because of their extraordinary trend and inventiveness. Actually , what motivates me to conduct this research is the fear that some students may face when they are asked by teacher to design deconstructive project . These worries usually come because the students do not know the way of executing such deconstructive forms which creates many barriers to students to use their imagination in order to produce new shape of building .This might surround student in a small corner and his design will be sustainably trapped in a traditional manner.
Consequently, this research will focus on studying many deconstractive projects for famous architects such as Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind …etc as an attempt to clarify some obscure items on their structuralshapeand philosophy.
2. Problem Statement
After the establishment of deconstructivism in the beginning of 1980s, architecture departments on the Americans universities has started focusing on it and teaching it as one of the main subjects. However, in many countries, there are not even some interests about it. Architect should be creative in his own works and should put his special touch in his projects. He has to deal with whatever is new on his major, otherwise architects would stand at the same point and all building will be similar, like what we observe today in some cities .There is no variety which will give the feeling of monotony in the city’s general form and the sky line as well. In Kuala Lumpur (KL), we have seen the nice diversity of the architecture that reflects how much KL has become an advanced country. This mixture is considered to be the main factor of encouraging the tourism in any country. Therefore, it is vital for qualified students to deal with everything new and deconstructivism should be learnt at architecture schools, they should be familiar with it.
Students find many complications to produce deconstructivism because they do not have any idea how such building is constructed and how concept of project could be translated into odd forms .So architecture schools should concentrate in this sort of building in term of giving students the self-reliance to deal with and design it confidentially.
3.Purpose of the Study
Overdays, the number of professional architects and architectural students interesting in deconstruction are increasingly growing. Involving in this trend could take their potential imagination out into a new form that attracts people attention, make them stand astonished like what exactly we do when we see Zoha Hadid’s works .The purpose of the research is to study deconstructiveforms of projects and their radicalconcepts in order to encourage architects to be more curious about it.
4- The objectives of the study are summed up into the following points:
- To find out what inspires architectsin conducting deconstructive forms.
- To investigate on the birth of projects notion: philosophy and the architect’s way of translating it vividly and visibly in the project especially as external shape.
- To identify the causes of fear as well as relevant effects among students of understanding, producing deconstruction and fear’s effects as well.
- To inspect on the reasons: why architecture schools have not included deconstruction as an individual course within the curricula.
- to come up with some solutions that encourage architect getting involved in such trend of architecture like studying deconstructive projects from related aspects such as underlie notion or philosophy and the way of translating it into architectural design mostly focusing on exterior design of projects.
5-Research Questions
1-What are the inspiring clues of conducting deconstructivism?
2-How could architects translate their thoughts into strange shapes?
3-What is the level of awareness of UTM architecture students about the importance of dealing with deconstructivism?
4- What are the reasons of being carless toward teaching deconstructivism in architecture departments?
5-What are the difficulties that face students during designing in a deconstructive way?
6-How could we encourage architects to involve in this way of designing?
7- What should be done to minimize this problem?
6- Significance of the Study
This research will study deconstruction in details in term of taking out student’s fears by helping them recognize deconstruction nature and letting themrelease their potential talent to be exposed into tangible works. Actually, finding will help students to immerse in deconstruction ,making them interested while studying it. Architects will be more imaginative in their design showing us variety on building, on general view of the city as well. These varieties will flourish tourism. As we know tourists always search for everything new specially the architecture of country to get some entertainments .Therefore, the economy will be progressively stronger, noticeably increased that would give Malaysians what they have already planned to achieve in the year 2020 - to be the third economically advanced country in the world .
7- Scope
The targeted unit of analysis is UTM fourth and fifth architectural students. Students in these stages have a good background of many items of their major. They know how to design building which start firstly with the concept of project that reflects the main function of the building. They are qualified to architecturally design and structurally draw the traditional and normal building. They have enough perception about every single detail on producing a project .Therefore they are ready to comprehend the second nation of building (deconstruction). They will be able to interpret their imagination with their previous experience they already have into a new deconstructive form trying to find out how could it be constructed and functionalized perfectly in a nice, comfortable, and innovative manner.
Besides UTM architecture students, the study will also involve UTM architecture professors, teachers, PHD, master students, in order to get their opinion about this movement from many aspects like function, external and internal form, and structure. The collective information will lead to a better understanding of the general background and vision of specialists about this architectural movement. I have selected UTM university as a base of collected data and conducting research because it is classified as the best qualified university in Malaysia .So it will represent the best assembly that exemplify all architecture students and teachers of all different universities in Malaysia .
8-Methodology
This part of the research will discuss the tools used to get the essential information. the primary data are questionnaire, interview and observations .The questionnaire consists of studied questions divided into 6 types according to Academic Report Writing which are open-ended question as a qualitative data and close-ended questions-yes/no, liker-scale, listing, ranking and category as quantitive data .The questions were chosen to find out the difficulties of understanding deconstruction and to assess the interest of student for this issue .
The qualitative data for the research come from interview, observation, and experimentation .Trying carefully to choose the interviewers who are strongly related to the subject and respondents who will be helpful on giving their experience about this trend of architecture .Observation is another method of collecting data .To find out the causes of student fright of producing deconstructive projects
The secondary data would be collected from Books, Journals, and electronic resources such as e-journals, websites, and online materials.
9- Research schedule
Activities / Sem1 / Sem2 / Sem3M1 / M2 / M3 / M4 / M1 / M2 / M3 / M4 / M1 / M2 / M3 / M4
Proposal research
Literature review
Problem statement-aim-objective
Methodology
Data collection
Data input and analyzing
Findings
Writing
Submission
Designing project
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