Keynote 5

Saturday, October 26th, 9:00

Shen_Guan Shih

Shen-Guan is a professor teaching in the department of architecture in National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. His research interest is diverse, but information is always the driving force for all works. He is the chairman of Chinese Public Work Engineering Information Association. The association has been continuously developed and maintained the Geographic Information System for Taipei city government since 1989. From 2009, they developed a building information modelling code checking system for Taipei and New Taipei city governments. They integrated GIS and BIM to check building codes that depends on urban context, provide and analyze information that is derived from the integrated system for city governance. The development continues onto the administration of construction and operation phases of construction projects. The vision is to build up an information platform for smart city.

Coding and Decoding of Architecture

Architecture is a process of communication that involves multi-level coding and decoding. The talk proposes a view of architecture based on the model of communication proposed by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver in 1948. Information is the driving force of everything. Information is a kind of quantifiable property of data, which has to be stored and transferred by physical substances such as photons, electrons, papers, pigments, and buildings. The entire building life-cycle can be understood as nested processes of encoding and decoding. Coding is for finding the most efficient way to uncover the uncertain. Decoding is to build up the certain based on what is coded. Design can be viewed as a coding process that converts the client’s request to drawings, and construction is the decoding that converts drawings to buildings. Shannon-Weaver’s communication model and measurement of information inspires thoughts about architectural programming, design process project collaboration, constructability… and so on.