Interdisciplinary Design: New Lessons from Architecture and Engineering

Architects and engineers both claim to be designers, though how they define design and the approaches they use to realize it, vary widely. However their interaction has also created some of the world's most memorable, enduring and impressive buildings. The unprecedented impact of digital technologies illuminates the complexity and non-linearity of the process that these designers go through while massively expanding both the ability to visualize and represent forms, and to analyze their structural behavior. It has obviously changed both architecture and engineering, and so also the potential for interaction between them. Interdisciplinary Design began as a course at Harvard GSD attended by graduate students in architecture and also by MIT graduate students in structural engineering and computation. In this course students and instructors examined a series of built projects in order to develop new viewpoints and communication across disciplinary boundaries in teaching, practice and construction.