We would first like to thank the directors and all the staff at AKT II, past and present; without them and their projects, this publication would not have been possible. It also goes without saying that this applies to all their clients, patrons and collaborators over the many years, as without them there would be no projects. We would also like to thank Professor John Ochsendorf for a considered and most welcome foreword. Hanif would like to single out Dean Mohsen Mostafavi at GSD for inspiring, advising and supporting this publication and for his poignant contribution ‘Future Focus’ at the start of this book.

To the authors who provided us with this book's exceptional content; Jordan Brandt, Marco Cerini, Diego Cervera de la Rosa, Philip Isaac, Jeroen Janssen, Sawako Kaijima, James Kingman, Alessandro Margnelli, Panagiotis Michalatos, Ed Moseley, Richard Parker, Andrew Ruck, Adiam Sertzu, Djordje Stojanovic, Edoardo Tibuzzi, Martijn Veltkamp and Marc Zanchetta.

Thanks, in particular, to Harvard University GSD and the AA, for encouraging us, but also to all the other institutions over the years.

We would like to thank Joshua Simpson and Kate Hobson for supervisory editing, Jan Friedlein, Erica Choi and Fritzie Manoy for graphic design, and Jessica Wainwright-Pearce for all the support in coordinating both internally and with the Wiley team.

Finally, we wish to thank our families for putting up with the late nights and long weekends during the construction of this book over the last two years.

MOHSEN MOSTAFAVI

In architecture, the connection between the logic of a form and the logic of its structure always used to be thought of as direct, linear, and overtly rational. Right up to the latter part of the twentieth century, the principle of upright structural support, represented by vertical columns and horizontal beams, provided the dominant method for the conceptualisation and design of most buildings.

This Cartesian mode of imagining the reciprocities between form and structure, in all its many iterations, is of course still very much with us today. It continues to be the reference point for the vast majority of contemporary architectural projects, shaping our imaginations as well as the prevalent methods of the building industry, which in turn feed back into the design process through, for example, the considerations of cost and period of construction.

Buildings produced through a column grid structure can vary enormously in their systematic adherence to the relation between form and structure. But this relation was itself radically transformed during the second part of the twentieth century, with the evolution of concrete thin shell structures that brought about a synthetic unity between form and structure. Engineers such as Pier Luigi Nervi, Eduardo Torroja, and Felix Candela were instrumental in developing forms that were no longer purely reliant on traditional methods of building construction. In place of structure as form, they proposed the notion of form as structure.

Through its exploration of both the geometric properties of shell structures and the elastic qualities of reinforced concrete, the work of these engineers produced a radically different conception of architectural form. Their research resulted in spatial forms that at times seem to closely resemble shapes and patterns found in nature.

These developments in the field of engineering also have some parallels with the earlier work of the Scottish biologist and mathematician D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, whose classic book On Growth and Form, first published in 1917, would become a primary source for subsequent studies of morphogenesis—the idea of forms and their connections with plants and animals. Similarly, one key consideration of the work presented in this book is the shift from linear to non-linear geometry. The structural behaviour of many contemporary designs no longer follows—or perhaps more importantly, necessarily needs to follow—traditional methods for calculating structural forces. In addition, technological advances have made it possible to both imagine and construct forms that previously would have been nearly impossible to conceive.

While often focused on the articulation of continuous skins and variations in the curvature of building envelopes, these explorations can nevertheless also be utilised to transform our traditional conceptions of architectural design and construction.

It is against this backdrop, and with advances made in computation, materials and fabrication procedures, that the contributions to this book have taken shape. Design Engineering Refocused proposes a new way of considering the hybrid relationship between design and engineering. For it is in the space of entanglement and reciprocities between these two types of practice that the authors have discovered innovative ideas and unexpected solutions that respond to typical programs and everyday needs of users and clients.

Mohsen Mostafavi is Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design.

JOHN OCHSENDORF

In his 2004 essay ‘In Search of Brunel’,¹ architect Charles Correa lamented the hyper-specialisation of the contemporary engineer, having evolved from the visionary master builder of the past to the number-crunching designer of individual components of today. The great structural engineers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Gustave Eiffel and Robert Maillart, designed holistically to invent new technological possibilities. The vision of the pure engineer as lone genius, achieving beauty through the constraints of economy and efficiency, has been celebrated by Sigfried Giedion,² Le Corbusier,³ David Billington4 and many others over the past century. The structural engineer as singular artist applies most clearly to bridge design, where the challenge of spanning allows structure to dominate the design process. On the other hand, building design requires a level of synthesis among disciplines which does not often allow structure to emerge as the primary consideration, and it is therefore more difficult to identify examples of the heroic engineer in the design of buildings.

The profession of structural engineering is in a state of open crisis today. A Vision for the Future of Structural Engineering,5 published by the Structural Engineering Institute, identifies severe problems and characterises the field as occupying a ‘shrinking space’. It also highlights the challenges in structures education and laments that most undergraduate curricula have not changed in decades. Compared with the staggering pace of change in computing, biomedical engineering or nanotechnology, the field of structural engineering can seem frozen in time. So it is a challenging time for structural engineering. Engineers are asked to do more with less: to deliver more design options with lower costs and lower environmental impact. And to have fewer people design more complex projects in less time. Yet, within this landscape of crisis, there are numerous examples today of stellar structural engineers bringing value to design teams.

In characterising the interwoven roles of the architect and engineer, Le Corbusier defined this as a struggle between the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘economical’ (Figure 1). Design is an endless frontier. It requires finding a balance between the pragmatic and the sublime. Architectural education emphasises the plurality of solutions and encourages exploration. Engineering education emphasises unique solutions, which can lead to a reluctance to explore. But the greatest engineers are ceaseless explorers. Today, increased computational power is allowing engineers to shorten feedback loops in design by articulating a common language for design goals and by providing a clearer view of the terrain to be explored. Instead of providing a unique solution for the design team to accept or reject, the best engineers can map the design constraints in a productive way. The exploration of the engineer is bounded by ethics: by protecting human life in building safely; by pursuing design efficiency in a resource-constrained world; and by seeking economical solutions for clients within a finite budget. Without constraint, there is no design.

This is an optimistic book. It portrays a highly creative practice exploring new frontiers in structural engineering and it provokes questions on the multidimensional roles of engineering in contemporary architecture and art. Structure is not the only driver in architecture, nor should it be. But the projects and methods described here demonstrate the myriad ways in which the mature field of structural engineering can still contribute in new ways. The book demonstrates the powerful opportunities for engineers to serve as collaborative synthesisers in the endless frontier of design. The fearless exploration of AKT II exemplifies the burgeoning potential for the structural engineer in the 21st century. Brunel would be impressed.

John Ochsendorf is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He became a MacArthur Fellow in 2008.

PART 1: INTRODUCTION AND TERRAIN

HANIF KARA

Design engineering has become a cliché of seismic proportions with multifarious and slippery meanings. In order to reassert a coherent promise and to avoid getting caught in its propagation as a buzzword, this book establishes a precise meaning from the personal viewpoint of the editors based on the fundamental triumphs, experiences, methods and concepts developed at AKT II, a leading design-led, structural engineering practice. This is executed by dividing the book into two parts, ‘Introduction and Terrain’ and ‘Heft, Ontology and Horizon’ of design engineering, defined as an esoteric scientific discipline combined with visual stimuli. To make sense of the changes in design engineering and identify patterns, we have curated contributions from past and present colleagues over two decades, enabled by a combination of practice, design research and academic encounters which capture new technologies, analytical tools and processes that have emerged. We are careful not to be conclusive about the subject.

The first part of the book sets the pace by peeking at the recent past, but focusing on the present to paint a picture of a complex blend of high-tech, low-tech, old and new, digital and analogue, with sometimes contradictory outcomes that are the terrain of design engineering today.