Intangible Material Culture: Technical Knowledge Transfer in Architecture


15:00 - 17:00 | 28 January 2019 | CRASSH Meeting Room, Alison Richard Building, University of Cambridge.

Our second cum panis seminar welcomes Ingrid Paoletti (Associate Professor of Building Technology, Politecnico di Milano), who will discuss her work on technical knowledge transfer in Architecture.

Abstract

In the time of digital information and dissemination, and the democratization of knowledge, technical-scientific disciplines undergo gradual but revolutionary changes. The need to transmit knowledge in the professions that stand between the creative disciplines and the technical-scientific disciplines such as the polytechnic ones has produced over time a vast body of rules and codifications to allow the competent transmission of knowledge. Extensive manuals have become indispensable due to the production process of constructive assets that do not present repeatability, as is the case of other more industrial products, but are linked to professionals that are aggregated from time to time, in turn, and with inhomogeneous experiences and skills. However, thanks to digital information, the culture of contemporary image, very far from the archetypical vision of manuals and the fast changing of ‘regola d’arte’, has increased obsolescence very fast. But codified knowledge has also been an important path for inspiration: innovations often come from a ‘deviance’ from consolidated written or oral rules of techniques and materials, that allows the development of new knowledge. So how can we create, design, and innovate today, if the material culture is not sedimented and part of our imaginario? Change is coming in the barometer of knowledge transfer in architecture.

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