‘...The term ‘building’ should be removed from the vocabulary and be replaced by a word that rather describes the term assemblage, the term of joining, meaning the art of joining or better ‘The art of the join’. The organic, logic and systematic design will dominate.’ 2) As in former times, it remained critical for the successful application of assemblage to keep in mind the relation between the whole and its parts. Before the assemblage could take place in the building phase, the subdivision of the whole needed to be worked out during the planning stage. SEPARATION OF KNOWLEDGE It is hard to say when, but gradually this knowledge became of secondary importance and aspects of formal expression, aesthetics and conception became predominant. Most architects today are still thinking within these paradigms of the architectonic idea. A pattern of thinking and producing architecture, which, at a certain point of the process, makes a translation from the immaterial to the material obligatory. This attitude did not change when the technology of CAD was introduced to architecture.
The new visual and spatial possibilities of this technology created a huge euphoria, as they opened up a new dimension for the above named aspects of architecture. Today, more then ten years after this digital revolution in architecture, we have arrived at a point where the usage of the computer as a design tool needs to be rethought. The computer allowed us to continue where the visions of modernist architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright had stopped. It allowed the creation of fascinating constructs of endless dynamic spaces, held together by complex continuous surfaces. Yet, many of these designs were and are lacking one thing. They remain digital artefacts, as they are created in the artificial, limitless world of the computer and therefore do not deal with parameters of the real, physical, material world. The few that are getting built are then confronted with these parameters. This event could be referred to as a process of translation, a process where the continuous elements and surfaces are subdivided into buildable ones. Although these trans
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