The loop
Four threads ran at once, each seeded by a different story from Campo Baeza’s own life and writing. A designer holding his framework wrote as him; a critic holding it reviewed as him, under five heads: keep, idea, remove, unresolved and maturity out of ten. Every revision brought in one unused story, and every third round meshed the best parts of all four threads. A control loop ran the same nine rounds with a generic critic.
What happened
The critic’s maturity score rose from 5 or 6 out of 10 to 7 or 8, then stopped. It never once found nothing left to remove. Three of the four threads converged on one building: a 9 by 9 metre room cut into a limestone tableland, under a white concrete lid, with one opening for the noon sun. The control loop reached a version of the same building.
Against his masterworks
| Candidate | Plain critic’s share | Framework critic’s share | Picked as not his |
|---|---|---|---|
| Loop, final | 0% | 33% | 100% |
| Loop, first draft | 0% | 8% | 100% |
| Control, final | 0% | 0% | 100% |
What the loop did instead
Critique pulled each design out of caricature within a round or two, toward where his real later work sits. After that the framework critic drove it into finer and finer technical precision: sun angles to a tenth of a degree, margins of 0.18 metres, riser counts. That reads as rigour, not maturity.
What to try next
An independent judge every round instead of the loop’s own critic, a critic told to remove rather than to check measures, and drawings, so the work can be judged as architecture.
Sources
- Feathers & Wax, magnum opus loop, code in
research/campo-baeza-opus.