The Journal of Architectural Education proudly announces awards for Volume
58's Best Design and Best Article: 

Best Article...George Barnett Johnston at the Georgia Institute of
Technology for "Drafting Manuals And Manual Training: Rouillon and Ramsey's
Architectural Details"

Best Design...Lisa Iwamoto at the University of California-Berkeley for
"Translations: Fabricating Space"


2005 JAE Best Article Award
JAE 58:4 (May 2005)
George Barnett Johnston, Georgia Institute of Technology
Drafting Manuals And Manual Training: Rouillon and Ramsey's Architectural
Details

In its analysis of the technical and cultural structure of Architectural
Details, the drafting handbook produced by Louis Rouillon and Charles George
Ramsey in 1924 as an antecedent to Architectural Graphic Standards ,
Johnston's article provides a welcome perspective on the development of
architectural practice in the United States.

By focusing on the training of architectural office workforce rather than
single architect's education, the article manages to shift the attention
away from architecture as a fame creation process. Instead, it considers the
social and institutional context within which the profession existed at the
turn of the century, bringing its intellectual and practical components
convincingly together. In examining the need and the reasons for the
publication of drafting manuals, Johnston opens a window onto the
demographics of practice and its underlying social structure, with the
inevitable distinction between work and labor, or the generation of ideas
and the production of technical documents.

Physical information (in its various connotations) becomes a way to connect
the forming world of academia with the world of vocational training - i.e.
to link Beaux-Arts elites and Mechanics Institutes technicians. Within this
framework, the definition and representation of content within Architectural
Details is seen as instrumental to the creation of a common culture. If the
Manual's plates instruct future draftsmen on drafting and building
techniques, its exemplifying images also educate them about spatial and
formal social conventions. By highlighting the rhetorical power of
professional manuals, Johnston demonstrates how vocation training "became
intertwined with the draftsman's - and architect's - social construction."
His is a precious addition to both social and technical history.


2005 JAE Best Design Article Award
JAE 58:1 (September 2004)
Lisa Iwamoto, University of California-Berkeley
Translations: Fabricating Space

This design article describes a highly effective pedagogical project that
introduces students to new design and fabricating tools and techniques
through an actual construction project. Three projects were produced, each
of them culminating in a full scale installation on the theme of
"threshold." Of particular interest were the gaps that appear between
various elements of the process: between physical models and computer
models, "between scales and modes of production.between rapid prototypings
and full-scale mock-up, between seamless form and standard sheet material,
between computer model and spatial or phenomenological effects." Rather than
being taken as problematic, these translations are viewed as opportunities
for discovery and invention. Thus students were encouraged to engage the
process as a dialogue among various tools and techniques rather than as
linear problem solving activity.

The installation themselves are fascinating exercises in the poetics of
construction. Using the potential of the CAD/CAM process for pre-cutting
numerous pieces to exacting standards the projects explore how subtle
variations can result in extremely imaginative, intricate constructions
where the objective is not simply tectonic demonstrations but metaphor.

Through the thoughtful way it engages the gamut of development strategies
and techniques and the opportunity to construct and experience a design at
full scale, this project offers students an excellent immersion in the
potentials and problems of the CAD/CAM process.

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