Abst r a ct N u m be r
638
Ca t e gor y
4.1 NEW FORMS OF ARCHITECTURAL PROFESSION AND
EDUCATION
Pr e se n t a t ion t yp e
RESEARCHEDBASED
Con t a ct
Name
Surname
Phone
E-mail
Country
A. Derin
İnan
+44(0)2072471694
derin@aaschool.ac.uk
United Kingdom
a u t h or s
No Name Surname
Degree
Department
Institue
1
A. Derin
İnan
Phd Candidate
arch.
ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION (AA) LONDON
2
NIKOLAOS
PATSAVOS
Phd Candidate
arch.
ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION (AA) LONDON
Presenter
TITLE
City-Profession-University & Architectural Research
ABSTRACT
Considering the shifting relations between the city, the architectural profession and architectural
schools, a shift informed by the emergent globalised social, legal and financial networks as well as by
new communication technologies-design tools, this paper will try to discuss architectural research as a
central actor within this environment. Emphasising on the innovative and the critical potential of
architectural research, one could answer the following question: How is research actually situated
within this city-profession-education compound, and why can an understanding of the former offer an
insight to the latter? The above will be discussed by referring to the Architectural Association School of
Architecture in London and the Design Research Laboratory – the AA D[R]L.
First way to frame the importance of research would be to focus on what is often described as a ‘new
research culture’; a culture consisting of a confounding array of new design and information
technologies, the new trends they have caused in professional practices and the team-based,
research-oriented forms of architectural education they have generated. An assemblage of new tools,
software and machineries allow or even impose interactivities, that generate the present shift to the
profession and thus presenting schools of architecture with a new task. New tools are both the vehicle
and the target of this analytical process-practice.
Architectural research could be understood as an assumed responsibility, a ‘promise’ to talk about an
event it actually produces.Then, architectural research would not call for a constitutive-theoretical
discourse, but for a performative ‘speech act’ opening the possibility for a self-subversive critical
argument. What this new network-like topology suggests is a process of opening architecture and
research to the city, of de-localising the centers of research and thus, globalising the local potential for
critical knowledge and performative action to occur.
BODY
City-Profession-University & Architectural Research
This paper will be an attempt to map out some of the issues and thoughts on the emerging
‘reality’ of PhD’s by Design; a ‘reality’ stemming out of the intensive interferences between
architectural research and architectural projects. The context of our discussion lies within the
Architectural Association School of Architecture benefitingfrom a series of discussions with
Mark Cousins, Brett Steele and Tom Verebes, all three active in teaching at the Graduate
School. This will not be a theoretical contribution, at least in the sense of presenting a
complete and comprehensive argument on ‘what a PhD by Design is’ or on ‘how to do it’. It
will be more a survey of the present conditions aiming at constructing a way to address this
topic and to develop a probable understanding of it. So, it’s not about the issue of PhD by
Design itself, it’s more about how to start dealing with it. Therefore, we are going to focus on
two issues which we propose as a way to analyse and frame this theme; the first being the
specific ‘architecturality’ of such a kind of research, and the second the issue of its
evaluation-judgement as a ‘PhD’.
A distinction should be made between PhD’s in architecture within a university setting subject
to an art history department (which would also to some extend control ‘theory’) and PhD work
in something like a graduate department of an architecture school. Even if the PhD topics
developed in these contexts look frequently to be pretty much the same, the milieu is entirely
different and, somehow, in the second case, the question of the ‘contemporary’ is always
present. This distinction between architecture within art history schools and history within
architecture schools is not meant as an argument on the essentiality of history for
architecture and its discourse, but is more about the ways the category of history is being
used within these two distinctive fields. On a second level, moving from the interdisciplinary
relationships between art history and architecture schools to architecture schools
themselves, it seems that present PhD programmes, with the exception of the science-based
ones on such topics as Environmental Architecture, Building Physics and Materials
Technology, are often giving priority to the evaluation of discursive elements, texts and
archives, somehow as if they are operating within an enclosed autonomous historical
practice. The scholar’s field of research is shaped within a certain environment of
hypotheses, data, problems and methods which eventually both generate the possible
questions and provide with the competent ways to pursue and evaluate them.
Design schools deal with ‘actual’ questions concerning the architectural praxis. It is according
to this specific mission of design schools that we will have to locate the kind of ‘operative
function’ that history and theory curriculums have. If, however, it were supposed that history
programmes produce practitioners of art/ architecture history (and theory) whereas, design
programmes ‘form’ practitioners of design, would the case for a division between ‘history and
life’ then emerge? One needs at that point to also note the distinction between an
undergraduate and a graduate architecture school. The first aims at teaching this set of
knowledges and developing that array of skills necessary for the construction of a certain
‘design-awareness’ to which the student’s possible future practice will be referring whereas
the second is about self-referential projects which constitute a value in themselves and, more
than just being of pedagogic interest, are always already design-practice themselves.
Graduate courses are often believed to be a way of getting specialised, gaining a certain
expertise on a specific field, thus taking a step for constructing ones individual professional
identity. The reason for drawing these distinctions is that the usual argument supporting the
need for ‘a new kind of architectural research’, if not even for ‘a new kind of architect’, is
based on these same exact premises. In that sense, history-based PhD’s are often accused
to be extraneous to designers’ concerns. The difference between art history and architecture
schools gets to form also the argument against courses on history within architecture schools
themselves.
There are currently proposals for practice-based PhD’s by which, as far as someone can tell,
it is meant the pursuit of a line of inquiry or research to be conducted in architectural terms.
What could that notion of ‘architecturality’ mean? Added to that, what could be the
appropriate system to judge such a piece of work? Coming to the possibilities the context of
the AA can offer us as a source of material on which to ground our suggestions as well as to
draw our questions from, reference will be made to the current ongoing reorganisation
process of the AA PhD degrees. It is by scrutinising some of the arguments accompanying
this specific reform that it is expected to raise some points of a probably larger validity. Up
until now, graduate studies at the AA have been conducted in terms of two distinct agendas,
the one of Research Degrees on the one hand, and that ofDesign Degrees on the other. The
former was organised according to the distinct fields of Histories & Theories,Housing &
Urbanism and Environment & Energy. However, this year it is intended to structure a new
programme, which will embrace all the previous research programmes under the single
umbrella of an AA PhD Research Degree Programme. In this new context, the AA Graduate
Design Programmes (mainly the AA Design Research Laboratory –the AAD[R]L, a sixteenmonth course in design leading to a Masters in Architecture)have also expressed their
interest to participate in the PhD programme. Stemming out of seven years of experiments
within design studios, there is a wide array of techniques, tools, novel attitudes, hypotheses
and methods that need to be developed further, tested and extrapolated within the
possibilities only a doctoral project can tender.
Brett Steele (one of the directors of the DRL) declares the significance of the programme as
an appeal for ‘a new team based and research oriented form of architectural education’,
which has been evolving with regard to the contemporary needs –architectural education is
facing- in the face of new trends in professional practice, as well as in the light of ‘a
confounding array of new design and information technologies’(Steele 04B, p.1). This
statement seems to be suggesting the two following points; firstly, a getting away from
‘personal creativity’ –a notion entailing an ‘isolated and self-referential sort of research’towards a research culture; a culture inspired by scientific laboratories and driven by
collective understanding and experimentation-based research methodologies. Secondly, the
emergence of new systems and tools of architectural research and design; a shift that brings
along novel information appliances functioning on the grounds of new testing and
experimentation territories. According to this argument, up until now, professional design
education has been promoting the image of the architect as ‘individual’ whose mission was to
struggle against a world of anonymous and standardised design. New research agendas, the
increased need for interdisciplinary co-operation within the emerging so-called globalised
context of architectural practice, are putting forward the necessity for a new professional and
thus for radical changes to the paradigm of vocational architectural training. A new collective
subjectivityoperates within the lab-like ecology of the present practice, an environment
bringing together people and machines in a non-hierarchical network. An assemblage of
new tools, software and machineries allow or even impose interactivies and real-time parallel
connections between people working together on the same problem, are generating the
present shift to the profession and thus presenting Schools of architecture with a new task.
New representation techniques are not just the tools-the means engineering more
possibilities for design; tools are both the vehicle and the target of this analytical processpractice. In that sense, a new sphere and attitude of research, a culture of systematic datadriven inventions is defining the current shift from writing to design, a shift from ‘the historical
project’ to ‘an understanding of tools’.
What this line of argument (new toolsà new practice ànew research-education) lives out,
what it supposes to be produced as a ‘natural’ consequence of its reasoning, is two specific
categories which if indeed stretched out, they could reveal the conditions on which this
argument lies as well as test its limitations. It is the question of the specific-
distinctive architecturality suggested by the ‘tools’ and the scientific-like ‘research’ described
above, and, it will be argued, even more, the question of this architectural
research’s judgement. Research on tools is put forward as the necessary and adequate
condition for the establishment of a new and innovative architecture. A research on new
tools, and a research using new tools, is supposed to be a more architectural one. It is after
all these tools that are informing the practice and education, inasmuch as it deals with
innovation and research and not just with the ‘conservative’ job of transferring skills, has to
comply with this. Added to that, a new and innovative architecture can only come out of
research, or architecture can only be research! So, this is the way the research-architecture
compound gets formed by means of the DRL argument. This is what defines a new sort of
architecturality coming out of research, or a new kind of architectural research. So, both
research and architecture change through their interference in the space of the architectural
research laboratory. At the first place, it could look as if what is the innovative characteristic
of a PhD by design is the fact that it includes designs since this is what makes it different
from a traditional text-based piece of research. Although in the practice of architecture “there
is not necessarily any benefit, or even the possibility, in producing the discourse together
with the project”, on “a PhD level, there would be, along side with the elaboration of design
work, the need for the production of a particular position, the thesis of a project; the design
would have to feed in really directly and contiguously to any sort of textual production.”
(Verebes 04, p.3) This question on the formalisation of the argument could lead in examining
what has been, in a similar fashion, happening in the Fine Arts where the creation of a piece
of work has been accompanied by a relevant commentary. Is this an intelligent or even
intelligible way of using the PhD form? What is the role of the written material complementing
the visually represented artefact (project)? “Does one judge the object or the text?” (Cousins
04) and how?
How does such a piece of research get evaluated? Is there something about a piece of
writing that makes it more ‘markable’ than an architectural drawing? To what extend can this
be characterised as research when it comes to architecture? Why drawings shouldn’t be a
way to (re)-present an architectural argument? Would they actually be enough to showdemonstrate the mastery of a specific argument/discourse? Could a thesis exist even without
any text at all? On another level, are there different sorts of criteria for the evaluation of the
two distinct (?) parts of the PhD by design project? Up until now, the specificities of this new
sort of research have been discussed in terms of its architectural qualities. However, could
this stand as an effective way to frame the emerging research paradigm at hand?
Concentrating on a certain ‘architecturality’, an attribute attained by means of a scientific-like
modus operandi, could mean one is actually suggesting an essential, true form of
architecture according which one can both function and evaluate. The reference to science is
all about how one can, through the new kind of architecture coming out of it, evaluate the
results of a research project. Is the reference to an external, already established, discipline
enough by itself to legitimise the prevalence of a new architectural discourse? Should the
ways science and technology reason about and prove statements be problematised as well?
This recourse to science is in fact a way to support the project of a new autonomous
architectural discipline. Aiming at breaking with the demands and boundaries of the existing
validity systems of architectural practice and education, the internal discourse, in an almost
paradoxical mode, shifts to external concepts and methods which, however, once transferred
within architecture their meaning utterly changes. In that sense, there is an attempt to found
and establish a new normality; a normality based on a re-gained essence of architecture. As
if, in the case discussed hereby, “this dedication to research is suggesting an entirely new
kind of architectural style” (Steele 04B, p.10). So, would it be enough to define a new form for
architectural knowledge in order to get a new and innovative architecture? This seems to
neglect the double conditioning between the architecturality described above and the system
of its judgement. What is proposed is an understanding of this new form or architectural
research in terms of its conditioning by judgement as well as an appreciation of
thisspecific judgment by means of its field of application, architecture. It’s not about the form
of the research project itself. It’s about architecture and architectural judgement in their interrelativity. It’s an intensive relationship between architecture as research and its judgement
that could leave open the possibility for a sort of self-subversive argument. It’s not just about
creating the conditions for a new normality and then trying to fit into its autonomous model.
It’s more about how one interacts with and acts upon this model; how operating within this
model could allow even to contradict or to overthrow it. This is why the issue of judgement is
central. This is also why, in a sense, there are no two different kinds of judgement for the two
constitutive parts of a PhD by design, the ‘object’ and the ‘text’. This is the case for a criticalknowledge of architecture and the way it is attained by means of a system of judgement
without a priori.
If hypothesised that there has been a certain shift in the practice of architecture caused by
new tools, has this shift informed a move in the paradigm of architectural research ‘from
writing to design’? Is this the way to a more ‘architectural’ kind of research? Then, which
should be the ‘proper’ methods and approaches in order to be able to formalise, test and
evaluate such a piece of research? What is the relationship between this new ‘autonomous’
form of architectural research and its judgement? How could mapping this relationship reveal
the subversive critical potential of architectural knowledge?
REFERENCES
Cousins M., Interview with A. Derin Inan & Nikolaos Patsavos, London, AA, 22.03.2004.
DAIDALOS Architecture-Art-Culture, “The Need of Research”, vol. 69/70, 1998.
Hanrot St., “Research and Architecture”, Les Cahiers de l’enseignement de l’architecture: No 09,
EAAE – AEEA, 2000.
Kant Im., The Critique of Judgment, J. D. Meredith (trans.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952.
Patsavos N., “Business. Research. Architecture”, in: D. Preston (ed.), The Idea of Education,
Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2003.
Steele Br., Interview with A. Derin Inan & Nikolaos Patsavos, London, AA, 30.03.2004.
Steele Br., “Peer-to-Peer Multiplicity: Learning in an Age of Distributed Design Systems”, AD issue on
Education, London: Academy Editions [forthcoming], 2004.
Sigler J., “109 Provisional Attempts to Address Six Simple and Hard Questions About What Architects
Do Today and Where their Profession Might Go Tomorrow”, in: HUNCH – The Berlage Institute
Report No 6/7, Rotterdam, 2003.
Verebes T., Interview with A. Derin Inan & Nikolaos Patsavos, London, AA, 05.05.2004.