Research Collection

Journal Issue

Gazette

Publication Date: 2011

Permanent Link: https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-a-010643007

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ETH Library

Special Issue

ADate

01 / 08 / 2012

Fold, Punch, File

Tags

Plan, Design, Engineer, Architecture, Interdisciplinary, Etymologies

Editors

Rupesh Iyengar and Ying Zhou

Published by

FCL – Future Cities LaboratorySingapore ETH Centre for Global Environmental Sustainability (SEC)1 Create Way, #06–01 CREATE Tower, Singapore 138602chan.lishan @ arch.ethz.ch

GAZETTE

Keywords in ContextBeyond the Interdisciplanary

Perhaps the most fundamental and the most difficult three words over which dissertations have been written, ‘plan’, ‘design’ and ‘engineer’ are nevertheless an interesting platform on which the interdisciplinarity of the Future Cities Laboratories can be launched. Even though the latin etymologies of the words do not cover the range that could be supplemented with understanding, for example, entwurf and gestalten (German for design) or 设计 (design in Chi-nese and Japanese), or (Arabic for engineer) the words themselves serve as interesting links both within the discipline of architecture as well as in contextual understandings of their place in cultural contexts. Transplanted onto the Asian context, they have been adapted in multiple ways, which are visible in the landscape surrounding us today. The forms of modernist belief in planning, sustainability as concern being engineered, and the design vision for the future of the city-state, also manifest the ways in which context shapes architecture.

plan n. and v. Etymology: The word partly derives from the French ‘plan’ which means drawing, sketch, or diagram made by projection on a horizontal plane showing the layout of a building, city, area, etc. (1547 in Middle French; 1545 as plant), drawing that guides the estab-lishment of a building, or of a work which is to be realised (1563; 1538 as plant), and set of measures adopted in order to ac-complish something (1627) (planter: see plant v.). It also partly derives from the French ‘plan’ which means plane surface (1553 in Middle French). Compare Italian pianta (a1529), Spanish planta (1600).

design n. and v. Forms: Also 15 de-, des-, disseigne, disseine, 16 designe, (dessein, disseene, 17 deseign)Etymology: In 16th cent. des(s)eigne, the word derives from the 15th–16th century French word ‘desseing’. In the 16th

century, the Italian ‘disegno’ (also dissegno, designo) had the senses ‘purpose, designe, draught; model, plot, picture, pourtrait’ (Florio). Hence the artistic sense was taken into French, and gradually differentiated in spelling, so that in modern French ‘dessein’ means ‘purpose, or plan’ or else ‘dessin’ which means ‘design in art’.

engineer n. and v. Etymology: According to Anglo-Norman and Middle French, an ‘engigneour’ is a person who designs and constructs military works for attack and defence (12th cent. in Old French), a craftsman, a carpenter (late 12th cent. or earlier in Anglo-Norman), a designer, an architect (late 12th cent. or earlier in Anglo-Norman), a planner, a schemer, or a deceiver (late 12th cent. or earlier in Anglo-Norman. By contrast, the post-classical Latin ‘ingeniator’ means constructor of military engines (frequently from 1086 in British sources; also in continental sources).

Etymology

Historically significant, especially with regards to the tactical uses of military defense, ‘engi-neering’ as the discipline as well as a profes-sion arose far earlier than ‘plan’ and ‘design’. Today, we witness the greatest schools of engineering, institutes of technology such as MIT and ETH Zurich, having arisen out of initial military needs that were expedited with the industrialisation of nations. The complexity of engineering, as well as the act of forming, fitting, running the gadgets,

tools and machines, are either as simple as the wheel or as complex as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The plan and the act of planning accompanying engineering, are the means as well as the product of engineering design and design that is no longer engineering. Design, as the least functionally linked and most abstract of the acts, crosses disciplinary boundaries to cover architecture, engineering, product design and beyond.

Plan / Design / Engineer

Cover of Collage City 1984 by Colin Rowe and Robert SlutskyCover of Constructivist Magazine ‘XYZ’, 1929 by El Lissitzky

Manhattan Transcripts, 1980 by Bernard Tschumi

Acknowledgements

The interdisciplinarity of this exercise being extremely important, we would like to thank our fellow participants who helped complete the palette and also interro-gated the means through which we presented, edited and filtered the words. We would also like to thank the Future Cities Laboratories for the chance to bring us together.

PlanA plan is a scheme or a scheduled timeline of activities. The aim of a plan can in-volve an overlap of similar or dissimilar activities and events to achieve the overall goal of the design. Plans are in another sense very fluid in nature as they are subject to revision, changes and influence. A design plan can be said to be a design process whenever we set out priorities and benchmarks, clearly stating the steps to follow and the path towards the finalisation of the conceptual design. This is why it is important to spend time and effort in establishing a series of milestones to be achieved, correctly placing each phase on a rational sequence.

DesignDesign, which is widely attributed to architectural expression of thought, can be a complex task involving the devel-opment of different ideas stemming out of different conceptual matrices. Design could be influenced by the economics of the problem, whose parameters reveal the feasibility of the monetary resources; or a functional matrix, related to the use of space and all the services needed for the users to carry on activities; or a purely architectural matrix, which represents the designer’s ability to find innova-tive and unique solutions, responding to the programme through his wide cultural background.

EngineerEngineering can be considered as an art, a skill or a profession. It involves the application of scientific, mathematical, and economic knowledge in the correct proportion to generate a structure whose aim is to reduce human effort. Engineered specimens can be called by different names like machines, structures, devices, systems or even materials; an engineered process in itself explains the rigorous mechanism involved to arrive at a simple solution to a complex problem. Engineering requires spe-cific knowledge areas. Striving to achieve expertise and excellence is the goal of an engineered design. The aim could be to materialise efficiency, effectivity or el-egance, depending on the need of the scheme.

The range of images used here to illustrate both the historic as well as the contemporary use for ‘plan’, ‘design’, and ‘engineer’ will clarify better their interconnectedness in both function and their relationship to representation. The Royal Salt Works plan represents a design project that is also an engi-neering feat of utopic visions which was realised in a worker town that distilled salt for the French crown in

the mid-18th century. The Hausmannian cuts of Paris from the 1860s, one century later, represents both the same system of monarchical governance inflected by modernity’s transformation of urban vision. These, in some ways, are closer to the manual of engineering drawing, designing for implementation than the figure-ground plan of Collage City as a means of reading the city’s morphology from the early 1980s.

Similarly, the diagrammatic plans of Manhattan Transcripts are theoretical in their realisation. El Lissitzky’s cover portrayal for the constructivist magazine of the 1920s perhaps puts humanism back into the process. Afterall, the requisite designer is not a machine nor a set of algorithms. It is ultimately human decisions which make the design, plan, or engineering, functional.

Plan

Design

Engineer

0.013%

0.012%

0.014%

0.011%

0.010%

0.007%

0.008%

0.006%

0.009%

0.003%

0.002%

0.004%

0.005%

0.001%

0.000%1500 1550 1600 1650 1700 1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

0.013%

0.012%

0.011%

0.010%

0.007%

0.008%

0.006%

0.009%

0.003%

0.002%

0.004%

0.005%

0.001%

0.000%1500 1550 1600 1650 1700 1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

0.0020%

0.0022%

0.0018%

0.0016%

0.0012%

0.0010%

0.0014%

0.0006%

0.0004%

0.0008%

0.0002%

0.000%1500 1550 1600 1650 1700 1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

Plan of Haussman’s Urban Renewal in Paris, 1860s Plan for the second design of the Arc-et-Senans Royal Salt Works by Claude-Nicholas Ledoux

Reprinted from Thomas French and Charles VierckA Manual of Engineering Drawing for Students and Draftsmen, by permission of Esther Vierck