Tectonic thinking – defined as a central attention towards the nature of the making, and the application of building materials (construction) and how this attention forms a creative force in building constructions, structural features and architectural design (construing) – can be used to identify and refine strategies for improving a contemporary sustainable building industry. The architectural thinker Marco Frascari unfolds the notion of construction and construing in the essay The Tell-thetail Detail (Frascari, 1984). According to Frascari the two concepts have to come together to provide meaning in architecture. By this the actual building construction needs to contain a narrative layer making possible a construing of the meaning embedded in the structure. This intimate link between the creation of physical solutions and the creation of meaning forms the core of tectonic thinking. By understanding the potentials of the materials and the construction methods used and by transforming these into architectural design solutions – that reflects the logic of the construction – the processes of a buildings construction and its appearance are unified In the book Tectonic Visions in Architecture, Anne Beim argues that when talking about the tectonics of a building, the focus will then be on the meaning embedded in the specific construction, as it is interpreted both by the designing architect and the user (Beim, 2004). Construction and construing then become core elements in the design process as well as in the perception of the actual design result. Therefore tectonic thinking involves the potentials and qualities both found in the genesis of the construction solution and in the materialization of the final building structure.
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ReVault pavilion Detail of the structure Architects: Ole Egholm Pedersen, Dave Pigram, Niels Martin Larsen Location: Aarhus, Denmark Type: Case study pavilion Built: 2011 Photo: Niels Martin Larsen