Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Luc Phinney
Why is it that despite our best efforts and everyinnovation in technology the work of constructiondocumentation seems to grow evermore complex andtime consuming? What is the particular nature of thesedocuments, as architectural representations, and howdo they achieve (or fail to achieve) their ends? Wecreate documents of exacting detail and comprehensiveness,only to find them insufficiently anticiptory.The bad news is this can only get worse as economiesand ecologies, and their various margins, contract.The good news is that systems of ever-increasing complexityfollow a predictable curve and will ultimately,necessarily, be replaced. Understanding the role thatconstruction documents currently play in the everincreasingcomplexity of architectural production, andhow it might have been otherwise, is the purpose ofthis paper: how, that is, we might move from a prescriptivecomplexity to an open, yet parsimonious,representational paradigm, and why parsimony iscause for hope.
Volume Editors
Luis Francisco Rico-Gutierrez & Martha Thorne
ISBN
978-1-944214-08-1
