Project Daedalus: An Earnest Play of Building Between Storytelling and Metaphors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Every place is built around shared values, norms, histories and myths that are assumed, implied, or tactfully left unsaid. Architecture is at its core an accomplice to the untidy matter of human stories and aspi- rations, even if the architect’s work typically results in concrete and measurable compositions. The making of architecture, in every one of its pleasures and difficulties, involves the crucial task of interpreting among tangible materials and the multitude of implicit forces that characterize a particular place. My proposition is that literature and storytelling can play an essential role in this interpretive task, and that they are especially fruitful for architectural pedagogy. This article reflects on this proposition via examples of student work pro- duced under my guidance at McGill University.The work was the result of an exploratory design project structured around Daedalus, the prototypical figure of the ancient Greek architect best known for his craftsmanship and cunning intelligence. His works – amongst them the legendary labyrinth that enclosed the half-man half-bull Minotaur – were said to inspire a profound sense of wonder mingled with fear, akin to the presence of the divine. Project Daedalus was not a studio project that resulted in a building design but an elective course which, taking its cue from Daedalus, focused on architectural craft. It asked the students to concentrate on ‘building’ as a verb rather than a noun, an action rather than an object. The final projects emerged through a series of exercises that required students to translate between tactile and literary mediums. With Project Daedalus, literary constructs suspended commitment to a final and concrete outcome, while opening up the opportunity for play.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".