Sunday, 8 April 2007 | Levent OZLER

Tectonics Making Meaning

International Conference and Student Design Competition

"Tectonics Making Meaning" is an international conference and student design competition which will take place at the Department of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Technology in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. The event consists of an international student design competition as well as an international conference to be held on the 10, 11 en 12 December 2007. The Chief Government Architect of The Netherlands, Mels Crouwel will open the conference. Speakers include Ken Yeang, Kenneth Frampton, Patrick Blanc, Bert Dirrix and others, yet to be confirmed. The theme of the conference and the design competition is tectonics.

Tectonics is a way of talking about buildings whereby use, structure and experience are explicitly related to the materialization and the making of the building. Tectonics, from the Greek word tecton, meaning "carpenter" or more generally "maker", is a concept that focuses on the way a building is made and in what way this making is made visible in the building. It demands that the development of the program of requirements as well as the design of all aspects of the building, take into account the appearance of the building on the scale of the city as well as on the scale of the detail, and relate these to the choice of materials, technologies and structure involved. In other words, tectonics describes the way material and structure are used in the design process.

Crucial to the success of the event is that it will try to engage both the profession and the student. It's goal is to celebrate the international and multidisciplinary character of the making of buildings. As you can see, tectonics is an important parameter of quality within the building world. It is a word that covers the co-evolution of the production, or making of buildings and their design with reference to the purpose for which they are built and the technology employed in their making. Within the framework of the conference this concept will be used to focus on the close cooperation of the various disciplines within the building industry, from the planner to architect and from the structural engineer to the project developer. A major theme will be the considered production of buildings within the fast changing context of our social and natural environment.

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