Integral Design: The New Necessary Professional Skills for Architects and Engineers for their Role in Sustainable Development
Year: 2014
Editor: Erik Bohemia, Arthur Eger, Wouter Eggink, Ahmed Kovacevic, Brian Parkinson, Wessel Wits
Author: Zeiler, Wim
Series: E&PDE
Institution: TU Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Section: Reflection on Teaching
Page(s): 663-668
ISBN: 978-1-904670-56-8
Abstract
The built environment is one of the most important areas of sustainable development. New strong demands for a more sustainable built environment led to a more complex design process. To cope with this complexity architects and engineers have to operate together earlier in the conceptual building design process. As a consequence architects as well as engineers have to develop new skills. Also the architect has to learn, to not only share his ideas in the conceptual design phase, but to really open up his mind and to truly design together with the engineers. Designing becomes a team effort already in the conceptual phase of design. To support these diverse multidisciplinary building design teams a supportive design method was developed in cooperation with the Dutch professional organizations of architects and consulting engineers. The method is being used in a workshop Integral Design for master students at the Faculty of the Built Environment of the University of Technology Eindhoven. In this project students from different disciplines have to design a net Zero Energy Building within one semester. The design tool enables not only to support the design team during the conceptual design phase, but also to study the process within the design team in detail. Especially interesting is to see whether the architectural students would really work in a kind of open dialogue with the engineering students or that they would behave in a more traditional dominant role in the conceptual design phase. It proved that architects played a dominant role in defining the functions to be fulfilled by the design. Overall the attitude of architectural students and engineering students has to change to allow real
Keywords: Architecture, Engineering, Integral design, Morphology