Architectural procession: The Architectural Project.

THE ARCHITECTURAL PROJECT

By Alfonso Corona-Martinez. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2003, [pounds sterling]38.50

This book is about the processes by which architectural designs are produced. This simple statement might seem to locate in that body of literature about 'design theory' that had its origins in the propositions of the design methods school of the 1960s. Christopher Alexander's Notes on the Synthesis of Form, one of the seminal texts of that movement, is, of necessity, a central reference in Corona-Martinez's argument, but The Architecture Project operates on a much wider front. Its method is historical rather than mechanical, open ended rather than reductive, and this leads to less emphatic conclusions, but in my view, infinitely deeper insights into the nature of design in architecture.

In effect the book reviews the emergence and evolution of the way in which designs are made. It argues that, since the beginning of the formal education of architects, with the foundation of the academies at the end of the eighteenth century, it has been necessary to construct a coherent account of how design proceeds. This is rooted in the centrality of the design studio--and hence the project--at the heart of the educational method. Corona-Martinez has the good judgement to speak of plural processes, rather than singular, dogmatic process. He then offers the initially surprising proposition that this method has, in its fundamentals, survived unaltered for over two centuries. He shows how the progression from schematic initial idea--or, in his favoured term, composition--through more specific development, to an explicit representation of the design, has persisted in spite of changes in the techniques of building, ideology and, in recent years, of the development of digital tools of representation.

Around this central argument, the book explores issues concerning the description of designs, the history of education, the nature and definition of function, typology and, in one of the longest chapters, elements of composition. There are numerous insights, even if almost all these topics merit more extensive and deeper treatment than is offered here. To identify just one instance, it is surprising that the implications of Alan Colquhoun's important 1967 essay, 'Typology and Design Method', in offering a culturally grounded challenge to the precepts of the design methodologists are not taken further, particularly since this would add more weight to Corona-Martinez's thesis. Another quibble is that the argument is at its weakest when it veers towards prescription, as, for example, in a less than convincing attempt to enumerate a list of strategies for composition. Nonetheless it is rare to encounter a book that takes such an original and productive stance in relation to the established literature of design theory. Its method and content add much that is new to its field and connect the question of how we design to the wider cultural and historical accounts of architecture.