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TETXTOS REFERENCIA 
 
On Seeing Design as Redesign 
An Exploration of a Neglected Problem in Design Education 
 
 
By Jan MICHL 
 
 
Department of Industrial Design, OSLO SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, 
Norway 
Jan Michl's website | Jan Michl's e-mail 
 
 
“… every picture owes more to other pictures painted before than it 
owes to nature.” E.H. Gombrich, art historian, 1954 
 
“… one of the most important properties of all fields of production [is] 
the permanent presence of the past of the field, which is endlessly 
recalled even in the very breaks which dispatch it to the past.” Pierre 
Bourdieu, sociologist, 1984 
 
“Any new thing that appears in the made world is based on some object 
already in existence. (…) each new technological system emerges from 
an antecedent system, just as each new discrete artifact emerges from 
antecedent artifacts.” George Basalla, historian of technology, 1985 
 
“ if anybody were to start where Adam started, he would not get 
further than Adam did…” Karl Popper, philosopher, 1979 
 
We talk of design day in and day out – but is design really the right 
word for what designers do? This article [1] is based on a sense that we 
lack a perspective encompassing more than the individual designer’s 
creative activity and more than merely the most recent designer’s 
contribution – in other words, more than the term design is able to 
embody. We also need a perspective that will capture the fundamental 
incompleteness of all design activity, the fact that, contrary to what the 
word design is normally seen as implying, no solution will ever be the 
ultimate solution. 
 
When I say “we lack” and “we need”, I am not only thinking of us 
design historians or art historians who in one way or another are linked 
to schools of design. I am thinking of all those teaching design who feel 
that in many situations the notion of design is too narrow to describe, 
discuss and illuminate the activity taking place under the name of 
design – and perhaps equally insufficient to promote the understanding 
of a designed object. The fact that the English word design has now 
been taken into use in practically speaking every industrialised country 
and is becoming as international as the Latin wordforma,[2] makes it 
seem that the idea of design as a sole designer's creative activity 
leading to an ultimate solution is becoming more firmly cemented. 
 
I do not mean to say that we can or should manage without the term 
design. The word is indispensable in that it captures two central aspects 
of the activity of designing, i.e. that it is always separate individuals 
who devise their new solutions, and that it is the intentions of these 
individuals, and their own creative contributions, that are realised in 
the solution at which they finally arrive. In a way, insofar as the 
designer sits down in front of a blank sheet of paper or a blank screen, 
it is correct to say that he [3] is starting out from nothing; if the 
designer does not start working, the work will not be done. At the same 
time the word design articulates the fact that designers’ activities result 
in concrete “designs”, i.e. objects with fixed, finite forms, whether we 
are talking of drawings on which to base production or of the final 
product itself. What the concept covers well is in other words the 
individual aspects and discrete results of the design process. 
 
But although in one way it is correct to say that designers start 
from nothing, in another sense it is equally correct to maintain that in 
practice they cannever start from scratch. On the contrary, it can be 
argued that designers always start off where other designers (or they 
themselves) have left off, that design is about 
improving earlier products, and that designers are thereby linked, as 
though by umbilical cord, to earlier objects, or more correctly to their 
own or their colleagues’ earlier solutions - and thus to yesterday. In 
other words, what the word design holds back is the entire co-operative 
and past-related dimension in designing that makes designers’ 
individual creative contributions possible. Nor does the word design 
satisfactorily capture the fact that design activity is never really 
complete with the final product because all products are by nature 
makeshift solutions, and as such can always be improved. [4] 
 
The dominant position of the notion of design constitutes a serious 
problem in an instructional and educational context where there is a 
strong need for straightforwardness and transparency. The situation is 
scarcely improved by the fact that the design world has no external 
corrective to the idea of design as a stand-alone activity, such as those 
available to the world of academic research in the form 
of required references to used literature and to sources. Through such 
it is made plain that a scholarly undertaking has a supra-individual, 
collective, co-operative dimension, and that any practitioner is 
therefore part of a community and makes use of, and attempts to 
contribute to, its common pool of knowledge. Insofar as the word 
design has a tendency to hide the fact that the designer is and has 
always been critically dependent on earlier functional and formal 
solutions, students’ awareness of the supra-individual dimension in the 
design process is constrained rather than promoted by the very central 
notion of the profession. 
 
 
 
As the title of this article suggests, I want to propose the notion 
of redesign as a concept capable of introducing a perspective that 
expands the notion of design. 
 
The concept of redesign has the advantage that it actually contains the 
word design, i.e. the concept retains the individual creator dimension of 
the word design while at the same time, through the prefix re-, 
emphasising that the individual creative process has the character of 
step-by-step changes in, improvements on, and new combinations of 
solutions that already exist. In this way, the concept reminds us that 
every complex product that is improved embraces a large number of 
clever solutions that earlier designers have contributed, and which the 
latest designer freely adopts, makes into her own, and builds on. In 
other words, the concept of redesign underlines the fact that – both as 
process and product – design always contains a collective, cooperative 
and cumulative dimension. 
 
The term redesign is not a new word. It has long been in use in various 
design contexts although in a different and often opposite meaning 
from the one I propose here. While this article argues in favour of a 
perspective in which design emerges as a sub-category in a never-
ending redesign process, the concept of redesign is today used in the 
exactly opposite sense. Industrial designers both in and outside design 
schools have long used the word redesign to describe design 
assignments aiming mainly at a visual updating of solutions that 
already exist. This is by way of contrast to the term design, which is 
understood as addressing solutions that do not yet exist. Over the last 
ten or twenty years, the word redesign has been used in several other 
contexts, for instance in the theory of business management and most 
recently in web design. Here, too, the word is used in the sense of 
changes to existing products and systems – in contrast to the term 
design used in the sense of devising products or systems that do not 
yet exist.[5] 
 
This established use of the term redesign as a contrast to new 
designundoubtedly makes a practical and useful distinction, especially 
with regard to clients. It is useful in all the situations in which designers 
want to distinguish between solutions that a firm or organisation 
already has and needs to improve,and those which the organisation 
plans to acquire and which – from the firm’s point of view – must be 
developed from scratch. However, from the perspective of design 
theory and design history, this established distinction is confusing in 
that it creates a radically misleading impression that it is only in certain 
situations that designers build on earlier solutions, whereas in design 
proper that is not the case. 
 
 
 
So let me now discuss several essential aspects of this question of 
design-redesign. I want first to explain (I) why I believe that part of 
the problem resides in the very word design. As this is a less familiar 
territory, I shall be devoting a rather more detailed discussion to it. 
After this I shall consider (II) some consequences of regarding design 
only as design rather than as both design and redesign. Thirdly, (III) I 
shall briefly amplify my view that many things will fall better into place 
as soon as we regard design as redesign. Here, I shall also discuss the 
literature relevant to the redesign theme. Finally (IV), I shall shortly 
consider five possible reasons why the perspective of redesign has not 
become part of the mainstream understanding of design. 
 
 
 
I. Why Part of the Problem Resides in the Actual Word Design 
 
First, I would like to explain why there are grounds for viewing the 
term design as a problematic word. I am aware that it can be argued 
that a single word is not so important, that it is not all that much more 
than a label denoting a specific professional activity, and that the 
notion, at least outside the Anglo-Saxon countries, has only been used 
for the past 50 to 60 years. My brief answer to these objections is that 
the notion of design is a term that has further reinforced the tendencies 
already latent in the traditional terms employed before the word design 
came into use. Whether these were terms such as drawing, 
planning and fashioning or others like creativity, originalityand genius, 
the process of design tended to be understood, especially since 
Romanticism, as an individual, solitary activity ending in a final result. 
 
The reason why I believe the word design has reinforced these 
tendencies is, in addition to its current meanings in English, its unique 
track record in the British intellectual history. Although its roots go via 
Italian to Latin, the word design isa very English word. As it is used in 
everyday English, the word stands forintention, plan, project, 
intrigue or even conspiracy – that is to say concepts which all appear 
to refer back to individual persons, individual heads, individual 
originators and individual intelligence. (The well known sarcasm: “A 
camel is a horse designed by a committee” can perhaps be interpreted 
as suggesting that the word design can most naturally be associated 
with an individual mastermind rather than a collective undertaking). 
 
But it is not only human design and the human designer with which the 
word is associated. Both the word design (which appears in English late 
in the 16th century) and the word designer (which comes into use after 
the middle of the 17th century)[6] were frequently used in the 18th 
century and later in theological discussions linked to the question of 
rational, empirical proofs of the existence of God. By means of 
empirical argument (in line with the developments in science), the so-
called natural theologians[7] tried to support the Bible's central 
assertion in Genesis that God had created the world and all living things 
in it. The natural theologians turned their attention to the striking 
functional adaptations characteristic of the organs of plants, animals 
and human beings, which give the impression of having been designed 
by a rational being in the same way as man-made contrivances. It was 
in this context, before the terms design and designer were established 
as names for a trade orfor someone specialising in that trade, that the 
words were used to describe God the Creator and His work of Creation 
by analogy with human artisans and their works.[8] These alleged 
results of God’s work as a designer were now put forward as a rational 
proof of the existence of God. The fact that in the English-speaking 
world there had been a more than one hundred years long debate in 
which it was argued that the natural world was the result of design, 
and where God Himself was referred to as the Designer, probably 
coloured the connotations of these two words. It is possible that this 
way of speaking contributed to reinforcing the idea of the human 
designer as a sole creator and led to a flattering notion that the human 
designer and Almighty God have something in common. 
 
In British philosophical terminology, this kind of empirical proof of 
God’s existence is referred to as the “argument from design” or the 
“design argument”. It became best known through the book Natural 
Theology, published in 1802, written by the English cleric and popular 
author William Paley, the most readable representative of this kind of 
theological reasoning. The book is an impressive attempt to interpret 
complex functional phenomena encountered in nature, for instance an 
eye, but also a large number of other contrivance-like phenomena, as 
results of God’s design. In keeping with the earlier arguments of 
natural theology, Paley maintains that these and other functional 
phenomena must necessarily point back to the non-human Designer in 
the same way as complex functional mechanical devices such as a 
watch presuppose a watchmaker, that is to say a human designer. In 
his own words: “The marks ofdesign [in nature] are too strong to be 
got over. Design must have had a designer. That designer must have 
been a person. That person is God.”[9] 
 
The construction of this analogy between human products and the work 
of God ought to be of interest in the present context. For Paley, like 
various natural theologians before and after him, makes the reader 
take it for granted that the human process of creation resembles the 
creative process that God is asserted to use, in the sense that human 
beings create on their own and exclusively out of their own head. 
Afterwards, this human process of creation, which has now been 
stealthily given a quality of the divine, is used as the starting point for 
proving the existence of the divine Creator: God creating alone stands 
as a Designer behind the contrivances found in living nature in the 
same way as a lone human craftsman stands behind his own 
contrivances. Paley’s analogy is in other words logically unobjectionable 
only as long as the reader is willing to accept the hidden claim that the 
watchmaker really is a lone creator working on his own. For only then is 
it plausible to maintain the analogy between the watch, which 
according to Paley points back to the watchmaker designer, and the 
eye, which according to him points to God as the designer behind it. 
 
But if such a complex mechanism as a watch is taken out of the 
rhetorical grasp of natural theologians and presented in an evolutionary 
perspective of design history, it quickly emerges that no watch exists 
that can be seen as the result of a creation ex nihilo, that is to say as 
made from scratch by a single watchmaker, as Paley’s argument 
suggested. A watchmaker who has designed and made a watch always 
bases himself on a long tradition of watchmaking consisting of both 
large and small contributions on the part of a vast number of 
watchmakers. Without contributions from these countless earlier 
craftsmen and other mechanics it would be completely inconceivable to 
design, and just as inconceivable to produce, such a complicated 
instrument. If the watch, the epitome of a complex apparatus, is seento be the result of repeated improvements on the part of a large 
number of watchmakers over a long period, and if it is accepted that 
the watch would be impossible to design and produce without such 
improvements, the analogy of the natural theologians falls to the 
ground, as does their whole design argument.[10] To put it differently: 
the analogy falls to the ground because Paley's watch is such highly 
functional contrivance not due to design - but because of redesign. 
 
Criticism of the “argument from design” along these lines is anything 
but new. The whole of natural theology and its design argument was 
already subjected to powerful critical scrutiny in the second half of the 
18th century by the Scottish philosopher David Hume in his fascinating, 
posthumously publishedDialogues Concerning Natural 
Religion.[11] Meanwhile, this book, which was built up in the form of 
discussions between three participants, had only a slight effect on the 
predilection of the time for natural theology and its static view of the 
design process (which Hume’s brilliant spokesman Philo also touched on 
and ironically rejected).[12] Nor did the German philosopher Immanuel 
Kant’s equally determined rejection in the 1780s of the logic of natural 
theology have any notable consequences.[13] It was only with the 
publication of the non-philosopher Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin 
of Species in 1859 that a powerful theoretical alternative to the design 
argument was put forward within the framework of a theory of 
evolution. According to Darwin, it is “natural selection”, the key 
mechanism of evolution, that leads to functional adaptation in 
organisms and creates the impression that living nature is fashioned by 
a rational designer. (We shall return to this below in Section III). 
 
Today the notion of design seems to be still habitually linked to the idea 
of a sole creator, both in religious and non-religious contexts. It is 
hardly surprising to find the Paleyan argument from design alive in 
debates of the contemporary American fundamentalist Christian 
intellectuals. Usually called Creationists, these writers argue that living 
nature is full of proofs of “intelligent design” andthat it is a Divine 
Designer and not a Darwinian natural selection that is theforce 
behind functional adaptations in nature. [14] And exactly as is the case 
with Paley, the argumentation of the Creationists also stands and falls 
with the truth content of their core assertion that human artefacts point 
back to sole designers, in line with Paley's watchmaker argument. What 
is surprising, though, is that the evolutionary biologists who engage in 
heated debates with Creationists fail to pick apart this very core of the 
Creationist argumentation. While firmly rejecting all kinds of biological 
arguments in support of the idea of a Divine Designer, they appear not 
to be disturbed when God-like powers are imputed to human 
designers. [15] It is difficult to say why theseanti-Creationists continue 
to go along with the Creationists’ counter-evolutionary interpretation of 
human artefacts. Perhaps it demonstrates 
thateven the biologists’ perception of how human designers work 
continues to becolored by the Paleyan representations of the 
design process. Maybe it suggests also that we historians and theorists 
of design do too little to counter this rather customary view of design. 
 
To sum up: Why do I think, then, that part of the problem resides in 
the actual word design? In brief, because the notion of design, mainly 
on account of the word’s intrinsic meanings, but also as a result of its 
historical association with the reasoning of natural theologians, focuses 
merely on the single, individual and most recent creative mind. Thereby 
it neglects the fact that all new products and solutions, and all their 
designers, are deeply in debt to earlier products and solutions, and to 
earlier designers. To put it differently, the word design accommodates 
neither the co-operative, cumulative character of the design process 
nor the supra-individual, evolutionary nature of designed objects. 
 
 
 
II. Two Pedagogical Consequences of Viewing Design Only as 
Design 
 
Let me now shortly address two examples of problems to which, in my 
opinion, the notion of design with its single focus on the individual 
originator leads. One problem is (1) that it becomes difficult to talk 
rationally about quite ordinary phenomena such as the mentioned fact 
that a designer starts out from the solution achieved by another 
designer. The second, related problem (2) is the ambiguous position of 
the subject of design history in the curriculum of most schools of 
design. 
 
Re. 1. It is a fact that all designers, the outstanding ones as much as 
the mediocre or inferior ones, always build on, modify and continue the 
work of other designers, and that no one can avoid doing precisely this. 
But although it is an everyday reality with which all are familiar, it 
tends to be pushed aside as a result of focusing on the individual 
contribution of the most recent designer. When we attempt to discuss 
the fact that designers build on other designers’ solutions, it turns out 
that we lack a theoretical framework allowing of a discussion of this 
reality. Terms that we use in that context, expressions such as to be 
influenced, to be inspired, to take over a solution, to start out from, to 
build further on, or to steal, are used with an apologetic, or accusatory, 
undertone as though they implied a reprehensible lack of independence 
on the part of the designer, as though the designer ought really to be 
uninfluenced and indeed immune to influence by others, as though she 
ought to be 100% original in the sense of starting from scratch, i.e. 
creating exclusively out of hersole head. 
 
It is probably true to say that tuition in design leads in practice to the 
students’ nevertheless understanding that they always build on the past 
and that design is about the constant improvement of earlier solutions, 
whether their own or those of others, and that the creations of both 
nature and culture serve as starting points for their own design. But 
although the student might understand this, the idea that it is best not 
to be influenced by other people’s solutions remains as a kind of hidden 
ideal that rarely is explicitly challenged on a theoretical level. If 
students are not clearly told that insusceptibility to influence is a false 
and deplorable ideal, and that design is just as much a collective as an 
individual undertaking, we teachers make life difficult both for the 
students and for ourselves. The students ought to be told that what 
counts is not whether a solution comes from others or themselves, but 
how good the final outcome is, seen from the user’s perspective. If the 
students are not told such things often enough, they continue to aim 
for unachievable goals in which originality based on the notion of 
creation from scratch is still one of the most persistent, while at the 
same time being pursued by a bad conscience for not having achieved 
them. Such ideals make the teacher’s work difficult because, if a 
student makes his own originality his goal, he will try, logically and 
naturally enough, to defend his own individual artistic “innocence” 
against what he sees as harmful external influence. This leads to a 
fundamental hostility to learning – because learning always implies 
being influenced by others and adopting other people’s solutions, 
approaches and insights. The student can at worst experience the 
learning situation as an impertinent interference in herown affairs. 
Luckily, the schools of design, with their pragmatic bent, are less 
exposed to such dangers than the academies of fine art wherethe 
schizophrenic attitude to learning and being taught has traditionally 
been far more acute. 
 
Re. 2. As to the position of design history in the curriculum, the subject 
exhibits a somewhat paradoxical status in most schools of design. 
Majority of teachers view design history as an important subject; 
probably no one would think of abolishing it. On the other hand, it is 
seldom one hears really convincing arguments as to why this subject is 
important. This lack of clarity as to its usefulness results in design 
history being tolerated rather than embraced and integrated into the 
teaching of design. The reason for this situation might be precisely that 
the notion of design is still grafted on to a romantic notion of creativity 
ex nihilo rather than to a problem-oriented concept of creativity 
reflecting the fact that the designer is always building on and adding to 
the creative contributions of earlier designers.[16] So it is not 
surprising that design history as a subject in which the evolutionary, 
supra-individual and collective dimension of design activity most clearly 
emerges, does not receive any obvious, natural or logical place in 
institutions in which creativity is often viewed as a purely individual, 
more or less private phenomenon, unrelated to knowledge of historical 
and contemporary precedents. However, the problem might also be 
that we design historians present historical objects and their stories as 
belonging to the past rather than as a part of the present. A way of 
tackling this problem might well be to make physical products a more 
central part of the teaching of design history (this presupposes 
establishing of pedagogical design collections),[17] and with the help of 
methods such as “reverse engineering analyses” or “artefact 
hermeneutics”[18] demonstrate the historical structure of the objects 
and reveal their various layers of intention. 
 
 
 
III. The Concept of Redesign: New Light on Old Problems 
 
I would now like further to develop the assertion that many things fall 
better into place as soon as we regard design as redesign. Thereafter I 
will provide a brief (and necessarily incomplete) review of literature 
suggesting or contending that the amazing functionality of both living 
beings and artefacts is not the result of design. 
 
One of the things on which the redesign perspective throws light is the 
seemingly mysterious circumstances surrounding what looks like very 
intelligent inventions at the time when human beings began to produce 
the very first tools. If we look at design as redesign, we would assume 
that these earliest tools were not invented but rather discovered, that 
is, they were not made, but found. Tool is a name for means we 
employ in order to achieve an objective; such means were first found 
and taken into use, later adapted, and later still made specially for the 
occasion. The question of who the brilliant creative mind was who 
invented for example the wheel thus only arises and becomes 
meaningful as long as we assume that artefacts are the results of 
design in the sense of a creation ab novo. But if we adopt the redesign 
perspective, i.e. if we take for granted that functionality of our artefacts 
is always the result of step-by-step improvements to the tools available 
at any time – whether these tools are naturfacts[19] or 
early artefacts [19a] – then the origin of any intelligent contrivance 
becomes a good deal easier to understand. This applies as much to 
functional improvements as to aesthetic innovations.[20] If we look at 
design in the perspective of redesign, we can assume that some time at 
the beginning of mankind’s production of artefacts the situation 
essentially resembled the one in which design students - in fact all of us 
- find now ourselves today. Human beings who lived, say, 20,000 years 
ago were, just like ourselves, born into a situation in which they were 
surrounded by countless objects that they found useful in one way or 
another, though not completely satisfactory for their ends. In this, we 
are not different from our distant forefathers: although today we are 
surrounded by highly specialised tools, both their producers and users 
feel that these, too, have a great potential for improvement. 
 
However, it was not only the first human tools that came into being on 
the basis of people finding and using naturfacts and then gradually 
adapting them to various purposes. Our utility plants and domesticated 
animals are equally striking examples of gradual improvements or 
redesign undertaken by farmers and later specialist breeders in order to 
adapt them better to human needs. A choice was made, at first 
unwittingly, later consciously, of plants and animals with the qualities 
preferred, and only those were allowed to breed. In this way, by 
beginning from natural organisms, we gradually obtained all the utility 
plants on which we have slowly come to depend, and in addition such 
luxury redesigns as seedless oranges and grapes,[21] and similarly the 
awesome multiplicity of breeds of dogs we know today. 
 
Charles Darwin saw these achievements of breeders as results of what 
he called man’s power of selection, or of artificial selection. This 
observation was the starting point for Darwin’s epoch-making 
explanation of why there exist so many functionally specialised species 
with so many functionally specialised organs that look as though they 
were designed by a rational designer. According to Darwin, this was the 
result of the fact that some organisms, plants and animals, as a 
consequence of small variations between offspring in every brood or 
litter, turned out to be better adapted to the concrete surroundings in 
which they lived, and/or more capable in the competition with others 
for space, food and mates. So such better-adapted individuals had a 
better chance of surviving until reaching sexual maturity and thus 
propagating their kin. In other words, the better-adapted individuals 
had more descendants in each new generation than did the other 
individuals. It was this natural selective process of the better adapted 
that Darwin saw as analogical to the artificial selection, and which he 
first called the natural means of selection and later natural selection. 
The striking design-like adaptations found in organic nature were 
therefore, according to Darwin, not the result of design, i.e. neither a 
result of the animal’s own striving nor of the Creator’s preconceived 
plan. “Design” in nature was the result of a natural process of selection, 
that is to say of continuous change in the internal and external 
structure of the species through small adjustments over long stretches 
of time and many generations. 
 
By persuasively arguing that design-like phenomena in nature were 
results of minute changes over long periods of time, directed by natural 
processes of selection, Darwin gave a new impulse also to the 
evolutionary, historical interpretation of apparent design behind key 
institutions of human societies such as language, laws, market, money, 
religion, state, etc., as well as to the evolutionary understanding of 
man-made artefacts.[22] As evolutionists we presume that what 
mankind’s design activities and nature’s developmental processes have 
in common is that neither of them begin, or can begin, from scratch. 
Because they build on previous solutions, both new individuals and new 
products retain also a number of earlier solutions that were optimal in 
contexts no longer existing. Neither organisms nor artefacts can 
therefore ever be distinguished by perfection but are rather a mixture 
of optimal and sub-optimal solutions.[23] Both processes can be 
described as processes of redesign or, to use Darwin’s synonym forthe 
word evolution, as “descent with modification”. 
 
Let me in this context mention some authors who have applied an 
evolutionary perspective to our artefacts and thrown new light on 
various problems in our own and related disciplines. Among the central 
texts deserving of mention is a book by the American art historian 
George Kubler, The Shape of Time subtitledRemarks on the History of 
Things (1962). Perhaps it is on account of the book’s originality and its 
reflections, which are subtle and at times difficult of access, that it does 
not appear to have achieved any great influence. Kubler’s starting point 
is that “Everything made now is either a replica or a variant of 
something made a little time ago and so on back without break to the 
first morning of human time.”[24] The book was nevertheless well 
received by some historians of technology. Of these, George Basalla 
deserves particular attention for his book The Evolution of 
Technology (1988). This is a conscious attempt to build on Kubler’s 
insights, but also on Darwinism and some of the 19th- and 20th-
century researchers (sociologists, economic historians) who started out 
from Darwin’s theories of evolution. Basalla tries to throw light on what 
he sees as four key phenomena in the history of technology: the 
multiplicity, continuity, novelty and selection of artefacts. He argues 
that: “Any new thing that appears in the made world is based on some 
object already in existence” and that: “each new technological system 
emerges from an antecedent system, just as each new discrete artifact 
emerges from antecedent artifacts.”[25]Both Kubler’s and Basalla’s 
books are distinguished by a high degree of methodological reflection. 
Basalla’s work, though, is more enjoyable to read because he combines 
his ruminations with a large number of fascinating case studies. In 
Basalla, too, we can find short presentations of figures such as Samuel 
Butler and Augustus Pitt-Rivers, who as early as the 1860s introduced a 
Darwin-inspired view on the development of both new and old 
technologies, as well as of the later evolutionist historian of technology 
Abbott P. Usher. In this context, reference should also be made to the 
Norwegian social historian Eilert Sundt who already in 1865, i.e. six 
years after the publication of Darwin’s main work on the origin of 
species, published an article containing an evolutionary interpretation 
of a specific type of boat from northern Norway. Among contemporary 
authors, the American engineer Henry Petroski’s The Evolution of Useful 
Things deserves to be mentioned, as do his other books from the last 
twenty years. A recurrent theme in Petroski is the central role played 
by mistakes in the development of functional design. A host of similar 
themes is also found in the psychologist and designer Donald Norman’s 
important and popular book Design of Everyday Things from 1988, 
which takes up aspects of use and redesign in everyday machines, 
instruments, apparatuses and appliances. A quotation from 
Norman: “Improvements can take place through natural evolution as 
long as each previous design is studied and the craftperson is willing to 
be flexible. The bad features have to be identified. The folk artists 
change the bad features, and keep the good ones unchanged. If a 
change makes matters worse, well, it just gets changed again on the 
next go-around. Eventually the bad features get modified into good 
ones, while the good ones are kept.”[26] Another book in the field of 
design, Bryan Lawson’sHow Designers Think (1980) must also be 
referred to here. Lawson is not a historian; just like Norman, he looks 
on design from the perspective of a practising designer and architect. 
He says that he stands for: “… a rather unglamorous view of design 
problems” and insists that: “Design problems and design solutions are 
inexorably interdependent…” and that: “The stereotypical public image 
of design portrays the creation of new original and uncompromising 
objects or environments…”, but that: “… the reality is that design is 
often more of a repair job.”[27] Among biologists who have written 
about technology from an evolutionary perspective the names of Peter 
Medawar and Stephen Jay Gould must be introduced. With the 
computing world, or rather among developers of software, there has 
since the 1990s been an extensive discussion of advantages in making 
redesign rather than design (to keep to the terminology in this article) 
into a systematic method – a discussion that was linked to the question 
of advantages of the open source, i.e. publicly accessible programme 
codes, and to the development of the Linux operating system, which is 
open and thus can be continuously improved by others. Eric Raymond 
has been a core name in this connection.[28] 
 
These are both individuals and publications that in different ways have 
argued in favour of seeing design as redesign, though I have here 
generally limited myself to names from the Anglo-Saxon world. None of 
these writers meanwhile uses the term redesign as an overarching 
concept as is attempted here – I take responsibility for that suggestion. 
I adopted the word redesign from my former colleague Svein Gusrud, a 
Norwegian furniture designer and professor at the State College of 
Craft and Applied Arts (Statens håndverks- og kunstindustriskole – 
SHKS) in Oslo, who used the word in the title (but not in the actual 
text) of an unpublished lecture delivered in London in 1986, a lecture 
that I was able to read at the time.[29] It struck me already then that 
this was perhaps a word that, admittedly in an expanded sense, would 
be useful as a corrective to the notion of design.[30] 
 
I am meanwhile aware that the word redesign is no ideal concept 
either. It is possible, for instance, to criticise my description of natural 
selection as a process of redesign because where there is no question 
of design nor can there be a question of redesign. For the same reason 
it is perhaps problematic to talk of the redesign of naturfacts. The 
concept of redesign such as it is used here can also be criticised for 
being understood in as “imperialistic” a manner as the word design – 
that is to say without distinguishing between creating a blueprint for 
production and the actual production process or the workmanship (a 
problem that the British designer David Pye pointed out in the 1960s in 
his important book The Nature and Art of Workmanship). The 
word improvement is in many ways less problematic in this context, but 
it lacks the striking linguistic contrast to the word design, which the 
concept of redesign so obviously has. So although the concept of 
redesign as used here is somewhat rough and ill defined, I still believe 
that its value as a supplement and corrective to the term design 
outweighs these weak points. 
 
 
 
IV. Why is the Perspective of Redesign so Modestly Represented 
in Modern Discussions on Design? 
 
To see design as redesign is to see both design process and design 
objects in the perspective of time. We can ask why, in a situation in 
which Darwinism’s re-evaluation of the design idea has been so 
influential in many disciplines over the last fifty years, designers and 
those who write about design have so often kept to the sole creator 
view of the design. As an attempt to answer this question, I will list five 
circumstances that I believe have stood in the way of establishing 
a robust redesign perspective on human artefacts. These circumstances 
I believe to include: (1) the belief that it is possible to separate “the 
present” from “the past”; (2) the mental inheritance after the 
functionalists’ design philosophy; (3) the prestige of fine art; (4) the 
value of the new in our commercial society; and(5) the sales value of 
renowned designer names. 
 
1) The first circumstance that I believe has supported the notion of 
designers as sole creators is linked to the notion that a designer can 
work exclusively on the basis of “the present”. This notion, 
characteristic for the modernist ideology of design, seems to be based 
on a belief that “present” and “past” stand for objective chronological 
entities, that we are all agreed as to their scope just as we are agreed 
to the scope of “today” and “yesterday”, and that it is consequently 
possible for a designer to turn his back to the entity called “the past” 
and exclusively concern himself with the entity known as “the present”. 
It is easy to be seduced by historians’ talk of epochs, ages, eras and 
periods, all with well-drawn boundaries, to believe that it is History 
itself and not historians who undertake such divisions. We forget that 
there is a multitude of ways of drawing such boundaries and divisions 
to form historical periods, not merely one. The reason for this 
multiplicity is that histories are always being written, and divisions into 
periods always being undertaken, in relation to the problems historians 
are concerned with at any given time, and that such problems are 
many and widely different.[31] 
 
This context-dependent periodization of history is closely related to the 
contextual nature of what we call “the present”. Neither “the present” 
nor “the past” are units divided by some kind of natural, objective 
chronological boundary, as history books tend to suggest, and as we 
unreflectingly are inclined to accept. What we call “the present” is 
defined rather by our active mental relationship to a particular issue, 
matter or problem. The concept of “the past” is on the other hand used 
as a mental catch-all basket for everything that is, from the perspective 
of the issue in question, seen for the moment as not being immediately 
relevant. From this it follows that the very same issue that one person 
perceives as belonging to “the past” can by someone else (whether an 
individual, or a member of a group, a nation, or an ethnicity) be felt as 
being an intensely relevant part of “the present”. As to the question of 
their chronological size, “the present” and “the past” are obviously 
context-dependent variables. 
 
The use of the term “modern” can illustrate this context-related nature 
of both the terms “present” and “past”. Our children like to think of 
themselves as the epitome of modern beings, in contrast to their 
conservative parents. When modernist architects talked 
of modern Man, they were thinking of the people of the inter-war 
period in contrast to, for instance, the 19th-century Victorians and their 
contemporaries in other countries. We can also talk of modern Man and 
think of the epoch from the Renaissance to the present day, seeing the 
medieval world as “the past”. For Christians, modern Man can be 
identified with the period after the birth of Christ (of which our calendar 
reminds us), while bymodern Man anthropologists mean the Cro-
Magnon, i.e. the post-Neanderthal Man. Dependent on the context, 
then, the “modern period” stand for the past 15, 80, 600, 2000 - or 
40,000 years. 
 
It is therefore a misunderstanding to believe that a designer who 
chooses to base himself on the “modern age” and to stand for 
“modern” design, has as a consequence severed his link with design 
solutions of yesterday. The “modernepoch” of the modernist designers 
was necessarily a modern epoch of their ownchoosing, pertaining to 
their own particular issues – not a modern epoch of allof their 
contemporaries. There is simply no such thing as a single present – 
or asingle past. 
 
2) The second likely reason why the redesign perspective has not 
become part of mainstream design thinking is related to the first. It 
looks as though many pieces of mental furniture of architects and 
designers of today are inherited from the modernist design philosophy, 
which in the 20th century sought precisely to base design on the idea 
of a single present. The background to this thinking - and I will here 
only outline an ideal-typical gist of this philosophy -were the 
modernists’ sky-high artistic ambitions. They saw themselves 
as theservants of Art History and maintained by dint of this conviction 
that it was the duty of the architect and designer to give the new 
modern age, which in their view was still without an aesthetic profile, 
an authentic artistic expression of its own. They were to bring out the 
idiom innate in the new age. This was to be achieved by discovering the 
solutions that they maintained were still hidden in the new functions, 
the new materials and the new methods of production - and bringing 
them out into the daylight, as midwives would do. The idea that design 
was about discovering hidden, so to speak pre-designed solutions was 
perhaps most clearly expressed by the American architect Louis 
Sullivan in the middle of the 1890s, when he announced: “It is my 
belief that it is of the very essence of every problem that it contains 
and suggests its own solution. This I believe to be natural law.”[32] The 
same thought was implicit in the slogan for which Sullivan became best 
known: “form follows function”. It is a more concise version of the 
same idea, claiming that every problem, every function, has its own 
proper solution, i.e. not two solutions or more, but only one, and that it 
was the designer’s task to find this one correct solution and thereby 
the onecorrect form. The forms found in this way had, according to this 
functionalist kind of modernism, nothing to do with the contributions of 
earlier designers or artists. Earlier solutions, and especially the early 
formal solutions, should simply be forgotten because they were linked 
to earlier ages; as such they were out of date, invalid and worthless as 
far as the contemporary design practice was concerned. So it was not 
surprising that the history of architecture, the history of design and the 
history of art as subjects were only considered to be helping to confuse 
the young designer. The insistence of functionalist design theory on 
starting from “the present” turned out to be an effective strategic and 
rhetoric ploy by which to introduce and legitimise radically new 
aesthetic means in a situation characterised by polarisation within the 
architects’ and designers’ own ranks. This design theory, meanwhile, is 
best understood as a beguiling but empty bi-product of the modernists’ 
aesthetic agenda described above. It was admittedly highly effective as 
a weapon in their victorious struggle for aesthetic autonomy, but 
intellectually it was hollow, and it seduced and confused design thinking 
for several generations. In many ways it continues to get in the way of 
a more encompassing perspective on design.[33] 
 
3) It is a fact that designers and architects even today look up to so-
called free artists whose work process is said to be characterised by 
free creativepowers, and who have reserved the title of creators for 
themselves alone. This can be viewed as a further reason why it is the 
notion of design rather than perspective of redesign that stirs 
enthusiasm among designers and students of design. It is well known 
that ever since the Renaissance painters and sculptors along with their 
supporters have fought to raise their social status. They finally achieved 
their objective on the basis of their argument that their profession had 
a predominantly intellectual, scientific and spiritual character rather 
than a manual or mechanical. As a result of this striving, painters and 
sculptors have since the 18th century been elevated to a new, superior 
art category, now called fine, free or autonomous arts. With this,however, designers and artist craftsmen were left behind in the inferior 
category of “mechanical”, practical orheteronomous arts, i.e. arts which 
– allegedly in contrast to the autonomous arts – had the task of 
pleasing users, and which were based on the principle ofbound rather 
than on unbound creativity. Many designers still show signs of not quite 
being happy with an identity that they are inclined to think of as being 
second class.[34] Some are keen to move their work closer to the 
allegedly autonomous art, away from useful art, and away from the fact 
that they as designers are redesigners of things.[35] 
 
4) The fourth probable reason why the perspective of redesign has 
made so little progress might have been the intensity with which our 
western societies focus on everything new: the way in which newly 
produced objects are spoken and written about usually sounds as 
though they were only invented yesterday. In the vast majority of 
references to design in the media of today the emphasis is on the 
features that make that product into something new, while the colossal 
number of solutions that have been adopted from earlier versions of 
the product are taken for granted. In the commercial context the 
novelty value is naturally at the very centre: you promote the wares by 
pointing out their new forms, new materials and new technologies. 
People in the advertising trade are usually cautious about describing 
new products as “improved”, as such a statement has the disadvantage 
of throwing a problematic light on the earlier product as well as the 
new one, revealing that all goods by definition are imperfect. But also 
design critics and cultural journalists focus above all on the novelty and 
originality of the objects. It is not only a lack of time and column space 
that results in its being a rare event to hear about the historical 
dimensions, or redesign dimensions, of things: to point that out is 
usually felt to be a relativisation of the product’s alleged novelty - and 
of the named designer’s contribution. When the aim is to promote an 
object or a designer, it is difficult at the same time to promote insight 
into the making of objects. 
 
5) A fifth probable reason is that as soon as a designer becomes a 
regular figure in the media, often as the result of having been awarded 
a distinguished commission or a design prize, his name can be 
exploited to raise the art value and therefore the sales value of the 
product. Designer labels – selling a product with the help of the 
designer’s name (and/or signature) – further strengthen the illusion 
that products have a single and clearly identifiable originator. Not only 
are earlier products in the same product category rarely 
shown,[36] but by being only linked to a single designer name, the 
product is consciously or unconsciously presented as though it were a 
work of art. It is therefore imperative to smooth over the fact that the 
product is more often than not the result of a collective effort, as 
collective work is seen as something conflicting with the notion of a 
work of art only having a single creator.[37] The fact that the French 
star designer Philippe Starck has a whole team of assistants who 
ensure that the master’s aesthetic objects also work and are suitable 
for manufacture are, from the point of view of sales and promotions, 
entirely irrelevant. Until recently, and before feminist perspectives on 
design began to make themselves felt, we heard a great deal about 
Alvar Aalto, but not so much about his wife and colleague Aino Aalto; 
we heard about Le Corbusier’s furniture, but not so much about 
Charlotte Perriand’s essential contributions to his furniture designs; we 
heard about Charles Eames but not always about his wife Ray, who was 
his close collaborator. I believe that this was less the result of male 
chauvinism, and more a consequence of the deeply entrenched way of 
thinking that if an object is to be sold as something like a work of art, 
the public expects that it will have only a single creator, and not two or 
more. 
 
 
 
Beliefs about tangible reality of historical periods and about literal 
existence ofthe past and the present, persisting influence of the 
functionalist design ideology, hypnotic prestige of the autonomous arts, 
high commercial value of novelty, and moneymaking potential of 
famous designer names, all contribute to creating the impression that 
designers start from scratch and create on their own. But this does not 
alter the fact that in reality designers always begin with solutions 
formed at an earlier stage, most often by other designers, and that 
they thereby always – whether they want to or not – enter into some 
kind of collaboration with both their living and their no longer living 
predecessors – a collaboration that looks both backwards and forwards 
in time. In addition, most designers work in teams, that is to say that 
their final solutions are the result of collaboration between individual 
designers, or designers and engineers, or even more specialists. But 
even where a designer is working entirely on herown, she is in fact all 
the time “collaborating” with herself in the sense that she is continually 
changing, improving and further developing her own previous ideas, 
visions and solutions.[38] And last but not least, we cannot avoid 
seeing that the process of redesign is perhaps the only sure method of 
achieving, improving and refining the quality of whatever we do. 
 
 
 
Conclusion 
 
It is important to encourage students to adopt a problem-oriented 
attitude towards creativity and originality.[39] To understand and 
accept that as a creator, one always starts out from objects and design 
solutions that are already to hand (whether it is a matter of artefacts or 
naturfacts), and that one always builds on the inventions and 
contributions of others - that it is impossible to avoid this and that this 
is characteristic of every profession – all this is a precondition for 
learning to appreciate the significant contribution made by others to the 
success of one’s own design results. This insight strengthens the will 
and the motivation to learn from others without feeling that it is 
spoiling one’s own originality and artistic innocence. It is only when we 
realise that our own design is always a link in a redesign process that 
we achieve better control over our own work, because we better 
understand what and why and how much we adopt of other people’s 
solutions, whereby we can be more critical ofour own work processes. 
 
Meanwhile, there is no hiding the fact that the redesign perspective can 
have the effect of a douche of cold water on many designers, in that it 
may be perceived as belittling the designer’s own contribution. I will 
therefore, in conclusion, attempt the role of a mediator. 
 
I have argued in favour of a redesign perspective because I have felt 
that the opposite, the design perspective, has reigned largely supreme. 
Meanwhile it is important that neither the design perspective nor the 
redesign perspective should reign supreme, but that both should be 
present as two equally relevant and equally real perspectives. The 
notion of design has a tendency to place the designer’s own creative 
contribution under a magnifying glass. Important as this is for the 
creator, it at the same time promotes a short-sighted perspective of 
one’s own work, because the contributions of others only come into the 
field of vision to a very limited extent. We are then inclined to see 
ourselves as sole creators. But we pay for this satisfaction in the form 
of the sole creator’s mental isolation and fear of underachievement. 
The redesign concept on the other hand can be accusedof undervaluing 
the work of the individual designer because it focuses on the supra-
individual, collective, cooperative and cumulative aspects of design 
activity. We see our own contributions as though through a “minifying 
glass” that brings also the contributions of others into view. But as a 
bonus we achieve the certainty that we are not alone, that we are not 
forced to think of everything for ourselves, and that, as designers, we 
are all the time part of a distinguished team of inventive and 
imaginative colleagues even if we perhaps never meet them personally, 
and even if the majority of them are no longer alive. 
 
There is nevertheless a tension between the two perspectives, and it is 
easy to give in to the temptation either to reduce design to redesign, or 
to base ourselves only on the design perspective. Both are essential if 
we are to understand what being a designer is about. It is only when 
we are able to allow both these perspectives to exist peacefully side by 
side in our heads that we achieve a realistic, and civilised, view of 
design. This is not easy, but we can, and should, practise it – and we 
ought also to teach it to our students. 
 
Seeing design as redesign is seeing the creator as the re-creator and 
co-creator. But it is not so that the creator is lost in the perspective of 
redesign. One can certainly not be a creator without being a re-creator 
and co-creator. But neither is it possible to be a re-creator and co-
creator without being a creator. 
 
Relax! 
 
 
A Solidão dos Edifícios (Parte 1) / Rafael Moneo 
09FEV2012 
por Igor Fracalossi 
 
Escolhi três edifícios para exemplificar meu trabalho. Eles diferem com respeito às exigências e 
às condições do sítio, mas todos são edifícios públicos. Eles podem ser considerados como 
representativos do meu trabalho dos últimos dez anos. 
Por que edifícios ao invés de projetos? Por que trabalho ao invés de discurso teórico? Eu 
acredito que na crua realidade de obras construídas é possível ver claramente a essência de um 
projeto, a consistência de ideias. Eu acredito fortemente que arquitetura precisa do suporte da 
matéria; que o primeiro é inseparável do segundo. A arquitetura surge quando nossos 
pensamentos sobre ela adquirem a condição real que somente os materiais podem fornecer. 
Aceitando e negociando com as limitações e restrições, com o ato de construção, a arquitetura 
se torna o que ela realmente é. 
Eu sei que essas palavras podem parecer estranhas hoje em dia. Primeiro, porque nós estamos 
numa escola de arquitetura onde a aprendizagem é baseada na convenção implicada nos 
desenhos e modelos. Segundo, porque durante os últimos, deixem-me dizer, cinquenta anos, 
muitos arquitetos tem acreditado que a construção não é digna do esforço que envolve. Para 
eles, a tarefa foi terminada na prancheta, evitando qualquer contaminação. E medo de 
contaminação é compreensível. Arquitetura como uma profissão é um longo caminho além de 
satisfazer qualquer um que ame a disciplina. Ela perdeu a importância que tinha na sociedade no 
passado. Victor Hugo disse que os livros mataram as catedrais; isso não era de todo verdade 
então, mas eu vejo que hoje podemos dizer que a comunicação em massa tem reduzido a 
relevância da arquitetura. Arquitetura já não e vital, nem no mais pragmático ponto de vista que 
a identifica com cidades e residências, e tampouco como o reservatório de comunicação 
simbólica. Os arquitetos inconscientemente reconhecem esse problema, mas não estão dispostos 
a encarar isso diretamente. E logo, apesar de que eles gostariam de conectar a arquitetura com a 
sociedade e a realidade como no passado, eles normalmente tomam um caminho errado e se 
tornam profetas de sonhos utópicos. Os arquitetos desejam um maior papel para a arquitetura, 
ou pelo menos uma posição mais respeitada. E percebendo isso como inalcançável, nós 
arquitetos estamos nos protegendo nutrindo a fantasia de que a arquitetura pode ser representada 
simplesmente através de desenhos. Tal visão tem sido suportada pela dialética entre utopia e 
realidade. Se os arquitetos não servirem à realidade, eles ao menos trabalharão para o mundo 
futuro sonhado em utopia. Tal visão tem produzido belos desenhos e apresentado maravilhosas 
intenções, mas na minha opinião esses esforços não são intrinsecamente arquitetura –o que não 
quer dizer que as pessoas que agem assim não sejam arquitetos. 
Sabe-se quão importante esse assunto é hoje, mas ao mesmo tempo ele é rejeitado pelos 
arquitetos, na medida em que os edifícios começam a aparecer como meros reflexos de 
desenhos ou como diretas representações físicas de um processo. Isso modifica dramaticamente 
a relação entre edifício e realidade. Muitos arquitetos atualmente inventam processos ou 
técnicas de desenho sem se preocupar com a realidade do edifício. A tirania dos desenhos é 
evidente em muitos edifícios quando o construtor trata de seguir literalmente o desenho. A 
realidade pertence ao desenho, não ao edifício. Existem muitos exemplos dessa atitude que eu 
não preciso elaborá-la. Os edifícios se referem tão diretamente à definição do arquiteto e são tão 
desconectados com a operação de edificar que a única referência é o desenho. Porém um 
verdadeiro desenho arquitetônico deveria implicar sobretudo todo o conhecimento de 
construção. Hoje muitos arquitetos ignoram problemas sobre como uma obra será construída. 
Alguns argumentarão que isso aconteceu no passado, que algumas obras foram executadas sem 
serem visitadas por seus arquitetos, quem confiaram diretamente em desenhos e especificações 
para a execução de seus projetos. Mas, claro, todos irão concordar que os arquitetos no passado 
tiraram vantagem de uma coerência social que não existe hoje. Um desenho aceito, antes que ele 
fosse desenhado, convenções edilícias seguras. Foi somente recentemente, talvez com alguns 
arquitetos do Iluminismo, que a conexão entre expressão gráfica e conhecimento edilício 
começou a se dissolver. 
Na outra mão, muitos arquitetos acreditam que a obra de arquitetura deve envolver o registro 
exato de um processo. Se na década de 1920 a ideia de promenade architecturelle transformou a 
estrutura do edifício e produziu uma série de sequências que introduziram a ideia de 
movimento, na década de 1980 a ideia de arquitetura como a conclusão física que consolida um 
processo mental tem tomado lugar. Por essa transformação de um processo mental na realidade 
consolidada, a própria expressão de um edifício se torna menos importante que a expressão dos 
pensamentos do arquiteto. Além disso, a natureza automática da produção da arquitetura impede 
a autonomia do objeto. E, naturalmente, questionamentos surgem: pode o processo ser 
considerado o cerne da arquitetura? A arquitetura não reside na produção de algo mais? Pode o 
simples registro do processo se tornar a realidade que chamamos arquitetura? São os edifícios 
simples transposições tridimensionais de desenhos ou o resultado de um tão comentado 
processo? Anteriormente esse não era o caso, quando os arquitetos pensavam antes na realidade 
do edifício e depois na do desenho com o qual eles poderiam descrever esses pensamentos. 
Hoje, a ordem dessa relação está frequentemente invertida. 
O resultado desse conflito com a física é que a arquitetura é transformada imediatamente tanto 
em reflexo de desenhos como na representação de um processo. O termo que melhor caracteriza 
o traço mais distintivo da arquitetura acadêmica hoje é “imediatismo”. A arquitetura tenta ser 
direta, imediata, a simples extensão dimensional dos desenhos. Os arquitetos querem manter o 
sabor dos seus desenhos. E se esse é o seu objetivo mais desejado, nesse desejo os arquitetos 
reduzem a arquitetura a umprivado domínio pessoal. Segue que esse imediatismo transforma as 
intenções do arquiteto e torna o que deveria ser presumido como geral em pessoal, declaração 
expressionista. A arquitetura tem perdido seu necessário contato com a sociedade e, como 
resultado, tem se tornado um mundo privado. 
Pode a arquitetura ser um mundo privado? Pode ela ser reduzida a uma expressão pessoal? 
Arquitetos, tão quanto admiram o reino pessoal no qual outros artistas parecem trabalhar, não 
trabalham sob as mesmas condições. Seu trabalho deveria ser, na minha opinião, compartilhado 
por outros ou, pelo menos, não deveria ser tão pessoal como para invadir o domínio público de 
uma maneira que não mais pertença naturalmente à esfera do entorno público. A arquitetura 
mesma implica envolvimento público desde o momento específico no qual o processo de 
projeto começa até o fim da construção. E novamente estamos num terreno escorregadio, 
porque os limites entre os mundos públicos e privados hoje são mais confusos que nunca. 
Quando arquitetura é produzida em cidades, ela expressa uma ideia pública. As cidades têm 
uma necessidade de uma arquitetura que seja tanto uma ferramenta, no sentido de transformar 
artificialmente o contexto físico, como uma estrutura de suporte da vida social. A noção de uma 
linguagem compartilhada para produzir o mundo dos objetos –os diferentes tipos de edifícios 
nos quais e com os quais nós vivemos– emerge como dádiva para entender a arquitetura e sua 
produção. E, portanto, eu não penso que nós podemos justificar enquanto arquitetura os intentos 
de alguns artistas que, confundindo nossa disciplina com alguma experiência tridimensional, 
criam objetos desconhecidos que em momentos se relacionam a uma mímesis natural e em 
outros, aludem a máquinas inutilizáveis. 
Porém, sem a conexão que existia no passado entre projeto e produção, construtores se tornaram 
meros instrumentos, e técnica se tornou subjugada –um escravo. A intimidade entre arquitetura 
e construção tem sido quebrada. Essa intimidade foi uma vez a própria natureza da obra 
arquitetônica e de alguma forma foi sempre manifestada na sua aparência. Nós sabemos que um 
discurso determinístico não explica a arquitetura, mas admitimos que os arquitetos deveriam 
aceitar técnicas e utilizar sistemas construtivos para iniciar o processo da invenção formal que 
termina em arquitetura. Mesmo uma arquitetura como a de Le Corbusier deveria ser vista à luz 
da honrada aceitação das tecnologias construtivas com a base para a proposta formal. E para ser 
um arquiteto, portanto, está tradicionalmente implicado ser um construtor; ou seja, explicando a 
outros como construir. O conhecimento (quando não o domínio) das técnicas construtivas esteve 
sempre implícito na ideia de produzir arquitetura. O conhecimento de princípios construtivos 
deveria ser tão completo como para permitir ao arquiteto a invenção formal que sempre precede 
o fato da construção mesma. Deveria aparecer como se as técnicas impostas tenham aceitado os 
limites da forma; para isso, é o reconhecimento desses limites que reproduz explicitamente a 
presença dos procedimentos construtivos na arquitetura. Paradoxalmente, é a flexibilidade 
técnica que permite aos arquitetos esquecerem a presença da técnica. A flexibilidade das 
técnicas atuais tem resultado no seu desaparecimento, tanto na própria arquitetura como no 
processo de pensar sobre ela. Isso é algo novo. Os arquitetos no passado eram tanto arquitetos 
como construtores. Antes da presente dissociação, a invenção da forma era também a invenção 
da sua construção. Uma implicava a outra. 
Referência: Aula Magna, Kenzo Tange Visiting Professor Chair / Harvard University Graduate 
School of Design, 1985 
Texto original em inglês / Tradução ao português: Igor Fracalossi