O sonho da intuição estrutural ou a nostalgia do canteiro no desenho

Abstract

The word intuition never fails to appear at the intersections between architecture and structural engineering. While engineers calculate, architects long for an intuitive apprehension of structures that would enable decision making without mathematical effort. This paper explores such dream of structural intuition, and the reasons for its persistence. We begin with eighteenth century philosophy (Wolff and Kant), which restrains human intuition to the realm of senses and images. Based on Sérgio Ferro's theoretical approach and Antoine Picon's historiography, we then examine how the new engineers of this very period strove for subordinating workforce on construction sites, interfering in the minutiae of the production process, and dismantling the technical knowledge that so far had guaranteed construction stability. We venture the interpretation that structural science development was rather a consequence of such dismantling than its cause. But it led to a contradiction: working time, the measure of all profit, increased instead of diminishing. Our hypothesis is that this contradiction gave rise to the search for 'intuitive' methods of structural definition, in particular graphic statics. We conclude outlining some pointers on structure teaching based on our historical perspective.