Methodology plays a central role in architecture. The way a problem is addressed, understood and solved is central in articulating the differences in what architecture can be. Design offices and practicing architects define their practice through their particular methodology. Although tools might overlap, the particular application and use of these changes from practice to practice. From drawing to model – digital or physical – across simulation, prototyping, and full-scale experimentation, the methods of architectural design are manifold and plural.

The goal of the workshop was to choose an experiment that we find particularly inspiring, and then present it, explaining why this experiment is making a difference in the practice it belongs.

Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni was a German physicist and musician. One of Chladni’s best-known achievements was inventing a technique (1787) to show the various modes of vibration on a rigid surface. When resonating, a plate or membrane is divided into regions that vibrate in opposite directions, bounded by lines where no vibration occurs (nodal lines).

When the Chladni Plates achieve a resonance condition, ‘standing waves’ are created. This is analogous to the similar effect in a vibrating string – except this is in two dimensions. At resonance, the plate’s anti-nodes will be oscillating and energizing the salt – the sand will (naturally) move towards a lower energy level as a node. That’s where the sand will collect (and remain), creating the lines we see. These are the lower energy (non-vibrating) zones.