Parti document

This Parti document was made available by Shaowen Wang.


Parti:

The BIG Idea

To complete an architectural project, there must be a beginning. This can be the most difficult task in designing a building. Architects sometimes invent a strategy before beginning a project. This is called a parti. This word is from the French language and is a derivative of the verb for
departure. In other words, a parti is a beginning. These beginnings can take many forms. They can also be a written statement of an idea.
However, architects generally make a graphic representation of the parti.
Once a parti is established, it serves as the organizing idea behind the rest of the project. This can include everything from the organization of the spaces to the elements used as decoration.

A scheme or concept for the design of a building.

In architecture, there are many types of thinking shorthand including the representational and the abstract diagram. The representational diagram is designed to be interpreted relationally, visually, geometrically and topologically. The bubble diagram is an example where the architect is released from the strictures of the plan but may still freely manipulate a series of functional relations that are beginning to represent a strategy for planning arrangements. The bubble diagram can be made quickly, changed constantly, interlaced with text and collaged over images. For the rational architect it is an essential representation for thinking that can also be used as a substitute for sketching.


Composite diagrams are the stuff of computers and have been sitting in the wings waiting for the digital third machine age to tantalise the observer with a cut-and-paste world of architecturally graphic revelry. These composite diagrams are also available as tools to explain an architectural intention that can cross information fields from tectonic detailing, context, scale, proportion and composition. In these circumstances the computer becomes a wizard, delivering a magical world of layers and application. Although there remains a soft-line world of bubble diagrams, used at the start of the design process to unlock a complex brief into an organisation of primary, secondary and tertiary relationships, the computer is a quicker diagram management tool, replacing hundreds of detail paper overlays with a click-on-click-off layer process intrinsic to computerised draughting applications. In masterplanning, where the bubble diagram needs to present a multivalent
1. having the power of combining with three or more univalent atoms.
2. active against several strains of an organism.


mul·ti·va·lent (ml
collection of information, including organisational elements, physical elements, demographics, climate, transport and so on, the bubble diagram is at its most complex and therefore best achieved by digital means in order that the message is at its clearest and cleanest. It can be argued that the same digital method is employed in flow and system diagrams; architectural drawings representing explanation and communication of problems that need to be solved in order to make the building concept function.


Flow and system diagrams present architectonic issues that are temporarily removed from theoretical and conceptual considerations, and are focused on the effects and forces of sun, wind, rain and consequentially ventilation, heating, cooling and sustainability. Whereas the bubble and composite diagram--after initialisation--are tools for communications, the flow and system diagram helps the designer observe and understand the critical components that make up the problem-solving condition.


The flow and system drawing comprises the full set of graphic symbols, including arrows, lines, dots, hatching and dashes, making up a language for the diagraming of architecture. Because architects think through the end of a pencil, the freehand sketch is still widely used for its quality of immediacy and can transform representational diagraming, be it bubble, composite, flow, system (or any other) into a hybrid type which is both symbolic, sequential and operational. It brings together, examines and then illustrates the complex levels of thinking implicit in the architectural design process, then presents them back to the architect for consideration. During this 'thinking' time, the freehand sketch diagram can perform other functions.


The referential sketch encourages the designer to diagram past influences, historical precedents and previous experience. It can serve either as a communication tool, illustrating how the architectural idea has been fixed back to an authoritative typology, idiomatic device, or an informational tool for the author of the drawing, where intellectual comfort can be obtained by introducing a successful historical model. It is not sufficient simply to photocopy or scan-and-paste the reference. It needs to be drawn again so that the 'thinking' is dualistic, running backwards and forwards between 'what has been and what may be'. The referential sketch provides a moment for reflection. By drawing the reference again--reinterpreting the original image to a lesser or greater extent, architects are reminded that their subject is both an intellectual and a scholarly activity.


Other forms of retrospection can also result in diagrams such as the doodle that normally results from engaging with one thing and thinking about another. Also the polemical sketch--sometimes presented as an irritable grouping of marks born of frustration, disbelief, or awakening, or a point of view previously held but not previously examined through drawing.


Drawing, like teaching, is a replenishing activity. If an architect does neither regularly, there is a tendency to descend into aesthetic prejudice. At the very beginning of a project, the idea is born in the imagination. (Architects prefer to keep it there for as long as possible because it is at its purest.) Once the idea is drawn it is limited by the skill of the draughtsman. If the drawing fails, it can lead to long periods of melancholy.


The first diagram is made in the mind of the author, and because architects are obliged to think three-dimensionally, the diagram is appropriately complex--not only comprising form and function, but also filled with light and sound. The beauty of the diagram 'as imagination' depends on the way architects conduct themselves. Because the mind-diagram contains a moral and ethical fingerprint, as to how the eventual building will provide the greatest good for the greatest number, the first drawing will not be good if it is thought of badly. Therefore, the first drawing is as much an expression of the author as it is of the author's idea. During the early stage of sketching, the diagram is required to fold the 'self' into the drawing, so that the link between the physical work, the imagination that draws it and the ethical responsibility that regulates it, are one and the same thing.


The first meaning of the French verb partir--'se separer de quelqu'un ou d'un lieu' (to part from someone or from some place)--promulgated le parti as a noun representing a second meaning viz 'Conception d'ensemble une oeuvre architecturale ou picturale': an overall architectural or pictorial concept. During the process of diagramming architecture, especially at the conceptual stages of drawing, there is a necessary separation or parting. This is when the concept becomes clear enough to develop its own identity, or when the first drawings have choreographed the idea to produce a sufficiently confident parti.


The word parti passed into architecture (via l'Ecole des Beaux Arts) to represent that freehand sketch diagram that was at the tangent between idea and imagination. The parti is the threshold sketch. If the parti--the first critical diagram--is not made well, it will be difficult for architecture to follow. If there is no parti, there will be no architecture, only (at best) little more than the utility of construction. Buried within their early sketches is the germ of a narrative or language. The early diagrams are reflective conversations with the language of architecture.

They are also cultural moments. An English architect will think in English, speak in English and therefore draw in English. The sketches will say in lines and marks what the author would also express in language. The drawing becomes a philosophical and dialectical illustration of what the author would also say in writing. Writing architecture with drawings at the stage of le parti is the ultimate manifestation of imaginative consciousness heading for realisation.


Qualitative judgements are commensurate to the clarity of the language. The better the parti, the more quickly architects are able to consider folding into the sketch the notation of materials, structure and mechanics. The architectural language will evolve simultaneously with the language of the drawing. If the drawing is in English, English architecture will be made. If the drawing is in Finnish, there will be a Finnish building.


Admittedly this may not be true for the Rationalists. Architects who depend on pre-set/pre-cast ideas, which are based on catalogue systems and predefined pre-tested methodologies put together on production lines, do not need le parti. But despite all the phenomenologists and poetical architects in a century where complexity triumphed over comprehension, the drawing or diagram is a quintessential moment which comes with a caution. If at first you don't succeed, you don't succeed.
a way to design (note the importance of axial planning, composition, distribution, disposition, poché, parti, esquisse)

The Beaux-Arts Design Method
The École developed a design sequence based on a logical structure that distilled three fundamental stages in the making of architecture: the composition, or laying out the diagram (parti) of the building; étude, refining the shapes and dimensions of the spaces in plan; and finally, detailing plan, section and elevation. The main rule was self-discipline, not conformity, although as in most architecture schools to this day, studio patrons would push their own preferred styles onto their students.
Getting each step right was critical to success, since the general massing and size relationships established in the composition had to be followed in the development stage. The point was to give the student a consistent grasp of the relationship between program and non-program elements so that he could accurately anticipate their disposition and space requirements long before drawing their detail. Conversely, elements of detailing could not be allowed to alter spatial relationships defined in the composition and étude, lest they compromise the concept, timing and feasibility of the project.

The style drew its name from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris where hundreds of young Americans had trained and whose program had inspired curricular reforms in most American architectural schools including the University of Pennsylvania. The students worked in groups called ateliers consisting of a patron (usually a practicing architect), ancien (older students), and nouveau, the less experienced students. Like ballet, the language of architecture became French as the student, working "en loge", literally in a cubicle, began by developing the "parti" or scheme, executed the "esquisse" or sketch, followed by plans done in "poché" and ended with the final "rendu" or rendering, usually done "en charette", meaning to meet a deadline.
The esquisse or sketch, was, in practical terms, the essence of the Beaux Arts system. A student was presented with a design problem and given, on average, 6-8 hours to produce an esquisse, a copy of which was collected at the deadline hour. The esquisse usually included plan, elevation and section. The student then had six weeks to develop final presentation drawings from his initial plans from which he was not allowed to deviate in any fundamental way. During these six weeks the student would receive several critiques from the anciens or patron depending upon his level in the atelier. There was also a good deal of give and take among those working on the same problem.