Phase(x) — memetic engineering for architecture

Phase(x) was a successful teaching experiment we made in our entry level CAAD course in the Wintersemester 1996/1997. The course was entirely organized by means of a central database that managed all the studentsʹ works through different learning phases. This set-up allowed that the results of one phase and one author be taken as the starting point for the work in the next phase by a different author. As students could choose which model they wanted to work with, the whole of Phase(x) could be viewed as an organism where, as in a genetic system, only the “fittest” works survived. While some discussion of the technical set-up is necessary as a background, the main topics addressed in this paper will be the structuring in phases of the course, the experiences we had with collective authorship, and the observations we made about the memes2The term “meme” was first introduced by Richard Dawkins in 1976 [1]. In analogy to genes allowing the replication of life, the meme is, in Dawkinsʹ theory, the basis of cultural replication processes. developed and spread in the studentsʹ works. Finally weʹll draw some conclusions in how far Phase(x) is relevant also in a larger context, which is not limited to teaching CAAD. Since this paper was first published in 1997, we have continued to explore the issues described here in various projects3Most of the websites of these projects are available at http://space.arch.ethz.ch. ther with a growing number of other interested institutions worldwide. While leaving the paper essentially in its original form, we added a section at the end, in which we outline some of these recent developments.