Innovative Building

Designing facilities which develop or handle world-leading technologies means creating something that has never existed before, so the design conditions and the performance targets include things that have never been seen before. In such situations, the already known or experienced knowledge and skill will not work, and you’re in a “don’t have this, don’t have that” situation. What you need at such times is a “bricolage” approach.
Bricolage (skillful work) means “to express your own idea using materials which consist of miscellaneous elements, and which are abundant but still limited,” and “looking back over the whole body of all the tools and materials you have gathered so far..., lining up all the possible solutions by which they could be applied to the given problem..., and then picking the one that should be applied.”
To put it frankly, it can be interpreted as appropriately handling a situation in which the excuse “I can’t do it because I don’t have X” cannot be used. The necessities for a bricolage approach are an everyday practice of careful observation of information and elements in one’s surroundings, keeping things at hand that might be useful one day, creativity, and wit.
On the other hand, the word that forms a pair with bricolage is “engineering.” They are contrasting modes of behavior, but Claude Lévi-Strauss said that “They are not two stages or two phases of human intellect. Why? Because both these procedures are effective.”
To put it another way, if we try to fit these two to design actions, the ultimate driving force behind creating world-leading things is engineering, but a bricolage approach is necessary for the process of getting there.
Science and technology constantly pursue new fields and things that have never been seen before. Their activities so far have been remarkable in fields such as accelerator facilities, super-high-speed computers, and biotechnology. In addition to those, new domains and unprecedented technologies will emerge in fields such as Industrie 4.0, IoT, and AI, and we can imagine that world-leading or world-first facilities will be needed at the same time.
Nikken Sekkei will keep on challenging world-leading and world-first projects from the two aspects of bricolage and engineering.
(Source: Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, Misuzu Shobo, 1976)

These ideas originated with "ID200", an activity where about our 200 engineers from the Building Services Design Division propose suggestions each year.