Analysis of Configuration : Knowledge Architectural Design of Context and Precedent

Design, and in particular the design of the built environment in which we live and work, is an enterprise about which it is surprisingly difficult to talk. Part of the problem is that the right words don’t exist to discuss an activity which seems at once to be highly personal, but whose product is public and, preeminently among the arts, social in its intent. However, if we look at the way that architects and design teams commonly work we discover regular patterns that suggest that there may be an objective logic in what otherwise appears to be a primarily subjective activity. Gaining a principled understanding of the way design is carried out is important if we are to devise ways of helping a process which is now better known for its failures than its successes. In this paper we suggest that there are two main forms of knowledge which are brought to bear on design: knowledge of context the particularities of site and brief, and the regular behaviours of built forms, the space patterns they create and their functional outcomes; and knowledge of precedent the body of buildings and projects with which the designer is familiar, which is used as a source, and perhaps more importantly, which forms the index against which the designer checks in aiming to innovate. By developing appropriate representations of built forms and spatial pattern or ‘configuration’ we shall argue that both forms of knowledge can be moved from their current status as fields of knowledge which are gained through personal experience and applied mainly through intuition, and are in this sense ‘autonomic’, towards the ‘heteronomic’ knowledge characteristic of science which it is possible both to share and contest.