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.