STRUCTURE AS ARCHITECTURE

Master’s Dissertation by
LOUISE PEDERSEN and JONAS TÄLJSTEN
Department of Construction Sciences
Structural Mechanics, Lund University

How does collaboration between architects and engineers work? Which are the advantages and disadvantages in the collaboration? How can you make the cooperation better?

The purpose of this thesis by Louise Pedersen and Jonas Täljsten is to make a connection between architect students and engineers, to find the differences between them and to try to collaborate. Authors wanted to know how difficult the cooperation could be, if there were any difficulties at all and what the reasons were.

Authors were interested in how you could make architecture develop in better collaborations and if the structure could be expressed in architecture. The method was here to make themselves Ginny pigs. Authors were supposed to collaborate in form finding. The form finding project was the architect competition, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

An outer form of the museum was found quite fast and the modifications were the large discussion areas. Authors have then discussed both the problems in their collaboration and what other people have written and said.

With a better cooperation you can make more interesting buildings. If the engineer understands what  the  architects  want,  which  impressions  and expressions, he can try to find a solution that fits that but still is structurally efficient.

And if the architect understands how the engineer thinks, and how different structures work, he can try to find solutions that will hold, but without destroying the architectural design. This means that with a better understanding of each others needs we could help each other find the best solutions.