For integration issues to surpass the technology-for-its – own-sake aspect and become celebrated in the design process, they must transcend the nuts-and-bolts of hardware integration and engage basic architectural ambition. Resolving the physical, visual, and functional fit among building systems is well and good. All buildings have to achieve these basic levels of integration to some degree before they can be built and occupied. It is also obvious that different levels of integration among the systems is possible and that a more highly integrated building is more likely to enjoy better degrees of fit, image, and function. But although these aspects contribute toward a better building, they do not inherently satisfy the notion of architecture.
If building components are the hardware of integration, then design can be thought of as the software complement. Design establishes the major architectural goals of a project and then directs the process of attaining them. The major goals can be described as the “architectural intention," and the management objectives as explorative work toward its realization. Constant human evaluation and the lens of subjective judgment prevent this from becoming a literal sort of design computation. Like the “if X then Y else Z” logic of software computation, however, design is the comparable rational process by which architects manage the process.
Unifying Art and Science
Design and technology, if considered separately, present opposing priorities and agendas for architects. Fortunately, their complementary nature allows for an endless variety of starting places and any number of resolutions. At one pole of thinking, for example, there is the architect-as-artist, for whom technology is a means to the higher ends of aesthetic and formal ideals. At the other pole, for the architect-as-scientist, design is largely the result of technically optimized and honestly expressed solutions. Pure examples of these two poles would be hard to find, however, because successful buildings usually have some flavor of both aspects.
In modern architecture, the tensions between these two poles, and their resolution, form an often-overlooked aspect of successful buildings — overlooked despite how they typify sound architectural practice. The marriage of design ideals and technical innovation has become a strong and prevailing generative device. This is especially true since the postwar popularization of mechanical systems and the resulting complexity of interwoven building systems.
Integration topics were born of these new complexities, and the struggle to incorporate large and expensive new systems into buildings continued. But architects would not be forever content to simply fit new systems into old ways of thinking about buildings. Accommodation of technology changed architectural practice in more than an additive way. Physically incorporating the machines of industry and the magic of science into the bowels of their buildings led many architects to think of new and dynamic approaches to design. Here was the opportunity of an expanded vocabulary of parts and an almost magic essence of technical wizardry. In general terms, air-conditioning, lighting design, vertical transportation, and information systems became integral parts of more and more buildings. At the same time, scientific advances in structural materials and envelope components led to other equally intriguing possibilities. Exponentially expanded dimensions of design followed as serviceability joined constructability in the domain of architectural thinking. It was also at this juncture, of course, that the two polar approaches to the marriage of design and technology split apart.
Integration as a Team Approach
Architects have a unique role in the business and culture of society, for no other profession is charged with a scope as broad as that of the architect. Neither artist, scientist, engineer, nor craftsman, the architect is simultaneously a little of each and something different altogether. Making architecture brings together those diverse broad concerns with several other demands, such as marketing, code compliance, budgeting, building climatology, human behavior, ergonomics, cultural history, urban planning, and so forth. No wonder it has been said that architecture is the only profession capable of equal concern for world hunger and door closers. On the basis of knowledge alone, architecture is perhaps the ultimate profession of integration. Artists may make better sculptures. Engineers may make better machines. Psychologists may prescribe superior environments. Only the architect is charged with bringing all of that together in a resolved, artful, and commodious final product that will serve for generations.
The increasing technical complexity of these fields and the implications of legal liability quickly led to the development of specializations. Mechanical engineering was founded by doctors, interior design by cabinetmakers, and so on. No one person can competently perform all of the responsibilities of designing a public building, and no one person should be responsible for all of the required expertise, background experience, or knowledgeable insights. Architects consequently work with many sorts of engineers, a host of project-specific types of consultants, and any number of product suppliers and fabricators. Large and complex buildings require teamwork, collaboration and coordination from the very inception of the project. The architect is almost always the team leader, however, and orchestration of the team happens only when the architect is a competent conductor.
Through the years of preindustrial society there was little distinction between the architect’s roles of creative spirit and master builder. The Michelangelos and Brunelleschis of their era were artist, engineer, and architect. Over time, our culture and our use of buildings became more sophisticated, crowded, and mechanized. Inevitably, responsibility for buildings separated into specializations under the architect’s direction and supervision. As individual buildings became more functionally unique and less repetitive of simple design programs, architects increasingly relied on the critical input of allied professions. What first evolved as a hierarchal organization with the architect at the top has become a deeply interwoven network of information feedback and shared decisions.
The Accumulated Wisdom of Architecture
Borrowing from Walter Gropius, a work of architecture can be operationally distinguished from mere buildings as something that adds to the “accumulated wisdom of architectural thought.” Obviously, not all works of architecture can be monumental icons of civilization; most good architecture remains in the background. These less assuming works must meet the same criterion, however: If something is to be built, the opportunity should be maximized and only the highest results expected. Technical and design innovations have no merit if they are only fanciful. Architecture expects rigor and ambition. Nothing less will be recognized.
A metaphor to explain this expectation and the emerging role of integration within it is helpful here. Suppose a mythical architecture library full of splendid volumes and the “accumulated wisdom of architectural thought.” Many shelves in this library hold books and journals covering theories of critical design significance and the exemplary buildings that have achieved it. An equal number of works (the dustier ones) in another wing of the library illustrate robust building technologies and acclaim the technical mastery of architects who so ably employ them. Alas, precious few of these volumes in either wing categorically address how creative design thinking and technical wizardry ever come together in these marvelous works of architecture — and this despite the mysterious fact that the same buildings are frequently acclaimed in both sets of texts. Design and theory writers are often keen to acknowledge the enabling technologies. Authors of environmental and construction texts are similarly appreciative of innovative and appropriate design expressions. But neither set of books has set out to bridge the middle ground between their respective wings of the library.
The fledgling small body of literature of the middle ground today would hardly constitute the beginnings of a third wing in our allegorical library. It currently exists only as a curious and dimly illuminated corner between the two giant wings. The peculiar books in these corner stacks do not fit comfortably in either primary classification. The few shelves allocated for them inhabit a narrow passageway between the twin bodies of knowledge that anchor the library. Lodged between the two main wings, the middle ground is largely transitional, and patrons pass through without much notice. But pass through they must.
There is another way to catalog the design creativity and the rationalist technology wings of this library: internally stimulated and externally stimulated. Internally ordered design books convey ideas, discoveries, and inventions—these convey implicit knowledge of the sort that can neither be categorically proven nor refuted. Technology, on the other hand, is the external, explicit order of architecture made of facts and figures that have been demonstrated empirically.
In his description of creative flow, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1996) uses similar terms to discuss domain and realm. Externalities can be thought of as the domain of architecture. These are the rules to which building design must conform in order to be safe and functional. The internal orders of realm, as it may be defined in architecture, is the continuity of past architectural accomplishments against which the contribution of a new work will be judged. David Bohm (1917-92) summarized in his studies of the implicate order and undivided wholeness: “The universe enfolds an ‘implicate order’ (the ultimate, connected reality behind things) and unfolds the ‘explicate order’ that we see — a continuous double process” (see especially Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980). Think of these two aspects as the domain and the realm of architecture and compare them to the two “wings of the library.”
Structural equilibrium and air-conditioning system performance are examples of external order. External technical orders like these are initially isolated and disconnected from meaning. In design practice, external order comes to architects as independent and loosely related items on a series of separate lists: programs, space requirements, codes, and specifications. These are usually described by numbers that are more in the form of raw data than of usable information. To derive meaning from them, we must study principles and rules that are external to our perceptions and sensibilities.
Design creativity, in contrast, is internally generated order. With only a blank piece of paper and a sharpened pencil we can sketch the kinships between external givens, such as those we intuitively grasp in a building program, like the adjacency of spaces and their placement on the site. This differs sharply with details of external facts that are initially unimportant to our ability to imagine possible solutions and poetic places. Architects find the internal, innate, implicit order of these relationships within themselves without having to know the laws of physics. Of course, internal order is neither communicated nor acquired in the same way that external knowledge is. Exposure and practice are the only ways to develop skill at internal ordering. Design creativity comes from within, from an internal sense of arranging the puzzle pieces into poetic unity. Architects imagine that the whole and complete picture will convey their internal sense of poetry to others. They believe that the final product will prove to be consistent with external determinants in an elegant way. They also imagine that the pragmatic solutions will be ennobled in the poetic statement. The final “poetic” product will, if all goes well, synthesize internal and external order as complementary states in harmony rather than as separate elements of a sorry compromise.
Architects seek to unify the external technics with the internal poetry. For example, daylighting, structural expression, and shading strategies are some of the more ennobled external orders of technology that are often thought of as part of design creativity. All three of these examples are evident in Le Corbusier’s famous description of architecture as “the magnificent play of mass in light and shadow” and are embodied in the idea of his brise soleil shading compositions. Of course, Corbusier’s long struggle with the underlying external principles of these technical ordering principles is usually ignored along with the inappropriateness of some of his solutions. What matters to architecture is that he pioneered the fit between the technical and the poetic ordering principles, between the internal and the external realities.
Integration reveals the fit between these external and internal orders, between explicit facts we know to be true and implicit truths we desire to realize. It resolves the dissonance between their separate realities. It also separates imagination from whim by the discipline of making good connections — not just between one fact and another, but also between the facts in isolation and the design ideal of a whole truth. In more practical terms, integration resolves building program and technical constraints with the ultimate design objectives. Learning about integration has a great deal to do with realizing how these internal and external orders complement each other. For now, it is obvious that design is unfinished until the two ordering forces are in harmony. Integration is the dynamic that aligns them.