Designing by editable layouts. Bruther's case

Abstract

Floor Plan has probably been the drawing piece that historically dominated architectural representation. Order and control, grids, axes and leader’s patterns, among others, have guaranteed a presumed balance and conceptual order of the Project. The Floor plan is an abstraction that orders and allows understanding of a project. Nowadays, there is a stretched definition of the floor plan, in which is presupposed that current uses get organized parallel in time that they are conceived. Drawings that organize uses display continuities, positions and relationships, links, categories or overlays, they are diagrams that show the operations of the potential (and changing) uses. This reading enable to see Architecture as an adaptive element in which starts is never from scratch, the origin is a reactive moment, it is the reinterpretation of some other diagram that is taken up again and formatted for other uses. About this, a hybrid analogic-digital way of projecting called editable layouts seems to be repeated in several architecture offices. This projecting mode claims the value of a more operative and accelerated profession, distant from the most recent parametric and process based conceptions. This implies that the Project does not have all- comprehensive aspirations and is not definitive or closed. Its authors assume that Project will be transformed, reconfigured and perhaps only partially realized, such a conception approaches a certain creative subjugation. Here arise the difficulties of explaining a project that shortly will be another.