Perspectives on Architectural Design Research

Perspectives on Architectural Design Research

EDITED BY JULES MOLONEY, JAN SMITHERAM & SIMON TWOSE

Perspectives on Architectural Design Research What Matters Who Cares How

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic information is available on the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de Perspectives on Architectural Design Research, 2015.

Editors: Jules Moloney, Jan Smitheram, Simon Twose. © Copyright 2015 by the Authors, Editors and Spurbuchverlag.

ISBN 978-3-88778-461-4 Publication © by Spurbuchverlag 1. print run 2015 Am Eichenhügel 4, 96148 Baunach, Germany.

All rights reserved.

No part of the work must in any mode (print, photocopy, microfilm, CD or any other process) be reproduced nor – by application of electronic systems – processed, manifolded nor broadcast without approval of the copyright holder.

AADR – Art, Architecture and Design Research publishes research with an emphasis on the relationship between critical theory and creative practice.

AADR Curatorial Editor: Dr Rochus Urban Hinkel, Stockholm.

Production and Cover: pth-mediaberatung GmbH, Würzburg.

Layout: Jules Moloney and Jan Smitheram.

Cover Image: Jules Moloney and Anastasia Globa.

This book includes research and projects by various authors as detailed on pages 198-203.

Produced with the support of the School of Architecture, Victoria University of Wellington.

For further information on Spurbuchverlag and AADR visit www.aadr.info / www.spurbuch.de

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This book provides a timely collation of activity and thinking on research through the medium of design. The mechanism for generating the content was a symposium conceived in the antipodes and staged as an event at the 2014 Venice Biennale, with most contributors hailing from the United Kingdom and Australasia. The idea was to bring leading researchers together in a roundtable format, to present and discuss a range of perspectives on design research that would be transcribed and edited to provide insight on some of the issues preoccupying the field. As the reader will find, the format of short chapters and conversations provide episodic breadth and insightful depth on what matters, who cares and how research is being undertaken around the globe.

The preparation for the symposium was underpinned by the selfless work of colleagues and an international network of academics, who participated in the double blind review process. Too numerous to name here, their generosity in reviewing and selecting the submissions is hugely appreciated. I particularly thank Richard Blythe, Nat Chard, Murray Fraser, Dorita Hannah, Jonathan Hill and Vivian Mitsogianni – whose expert and erudite contributions as panel chairs raised the bar for the symposium and this book. We could not have contemplated this project without the financial and logistical support provided by the Victoria University of Wellington and professional staff at the VUW School of Architecture. We also acknowledge and thank the New Zealand Institute of Architects who generously made available the venue for the symposium, while the seamless running of the event was due to the personable attention to detail of freelance producer Veronica Green and VUW’s Nat Perkins. Publishers AADR (Spurbuchverlag) expressed interest from the start, which gave us much confidence and has ensured the international dissemination of the author contributions. Last but certainly not least, I thank my coeditors Simon Twose and Jan Smitheram whose expertise and talent has contributed so much to this publication.

Jules Moloney, July 2015.

Contents

8 Foreword Peter Downton

10 Introduction Jules Moloney, Simon Twose and Jan Smitheram

WHAT MATTERS: AUTOBIOGRAPHY, THE NOVEL AND DISEGNO 16

Jonathan Hill Architects of Fact and Fiction

20

Ross Jenner Perplexity and Questioning: Design as a Mode of Thinking

23

Hannah Lewi Conceptualizing, Creating and Documenting Tactics for Digital Platforms in Architectural History

27

Sophia Psarra Re-defining Authorship: Venice as a Model for Design Research

29

Jan Smitheram Te Horo: Following the Concrete Drawing

32

ROUNDTABLE

WHAT MATTERS: EVERYDAY LIFE AND THE COLLECTIVE 40

Murray Fraser Design Research in a Globalized Age

46

Filipe Oliveira Critical Modernism: (Re) Building Politics

50

Penny Allan, Huhana Smith The New NZ: Methods for Reimaging the Identity of Aotearoa

54

Helen Norrie Regional Urban Studies Laboratory: Engaging in Collaborative Research With Policy Makers

57

Pedro Mendes, Pedro M. Alves, Maria J. Pita Drawing With the People, On the Street, Towards the City 60

ROUNDTABLE

WHO CARES: FASCINATIONS IN PRACTICE 68

Richard Blythe Ra 88: Knowledge and Design Practice Research

73

Simon Twose Practice Clouds: Architecture Still Actively in Formation

77

Markus Jung, M. Cassaignau, M. Xue Cremorne 2005: Top-Down and Bottom-Up Tactics for Robust Urbanism

81

Mahnaz Shah, Karina M. Zarza Re-connecting Identity With Design Discourse 84

ROUNDTABLE

WHO CARES: IDEAS IN THE ACADEMY 94

Vivian Mitsogiani ( The Possibility of ) Uncertain Conditions

101

Donald L. Bates Depth X Width: The Dimensionality of Design as Research

103

Michael Jasper Speculations on Architectural Research in the Design Studio

107

Martin Bryant Touchstones in Design: Learning Through Interdisciplinary Collaboration

110

Marcus White Methodology and Tactics for Design Research: The Cross Pollinating Three Way

114

ROUNDTABLE

HOW: SENSIBILITIES AND TACIT KNOWLEDGE 122

Nat Chard Searching for Rigor While Drawing Uncertainty

128

Christopher A. French Magmatic Drawings and Architecture’s Design Research Repertoire

132

Tuba Kocaturk, M. Biggs, R. Koeck [Re]searching [Im]probable [Im]possible and [Un]desirable Design Futures

135

Jules Moloney Planning a Design Thesis: Ways, Means and Tactics for Research Through Design

138

Katrina Simon Tactics and Transformations for Uncertain Territories: Cartography’s Contradictory Moments

141

Alfredo Ramirez, C. Oloriz Land-Formations Tectonic Grounds: The Foundations of Research by Design Practice

144

ROUNDTABLE

HOW: CURATION AND EXHIBITION 152

Dorita Hannah Disappearing Acts: The Performative Exhibition as Spatial Research

163

Michael Jemtrud Messy Tactics: Multi-Methodological Research and the Collaborative Project

167

Bree Trevena, Mille Cattlin Testing Grounds: Research Through design, Public Infrastructure and Policy

170

Ivana Wingham Touching Air: An Architectural Scenographic Encounter

174

Anthony Burke Open Agenda: On Platforms for Speculative Research Between Academia and Practice 178

ROUNDTABLE

186

PLENARY SESSION

194

Afterword Hélène Frichot

198

Notes on Contributors

Foreword If something called ‘design research’ was to begin tomorrow, what might we want it to encompass: how designers design, how they learn to design, what the limits and shapers of design might be? What other aspects of architectural activity should it deal with? Minimally, there is a range of possible social, cultural and environmental matters which could be considered and which certainly impinge on questions of why designing is undertaken and who, or what, it is for. But, such issues were central prior to there being something called ‘design research’. In grumpier moments over two decades it has been tempting to suspect some architects of using the term to fashionably relabel what they do. Enriched accounts, such as the range offered in this book, are required to clarify whether or not it is a useful construct. Since I am a fabricator and make things (up) as a way of designing, let me engage in a little fabricating around design research: tales of its history, present context, and of ideas for its future.

Some history: My first forays into the area date from the late 1960s, and by the early 1970s I was part of research teams studying the way people lived in cities and how we might better design for them (Lynch, 1977; Robertson et al, 1977). Thus, I was one of many concerned with ‘human needs’ and ‘design methods’. Both areas have had chequered histories, and suffered frequent scorn. They were pursuits that ravenously trawled other disciplines for knowledge and methods, and naturalised some of them for architecture. Hindsight renders much of the activity naïve although driven by ardently ethical attitudes, an approach that needs to be maintained.

What was then central to the inquiries were beliefs that they could lead to ‘better’ circumstances for the people affected by architecture. The idea being, at its simplest, that selected information produced by research disciplines could be beneficially used in designing. Definitions of ‘better’ were, and are, manifold.

The history and philosophy of science and the sociology of knowledge literatures concerned with how knowledge is produced in sciences and other realms allow readings that suggest designing is equally a way of producing knowledge. In architecture this production is not yet as codified and systematised as it is in most sciences, there is less formulation of the nature and extent of current disciplinary knowledge, what of it is significant, what should be challenged and reconsidered, and where to conduct fruitful new searches. Debate about the nature and extent of any human knowledge is fun, but loose quotidian constructions of what someone knows will suffice. There is value in distinguishing knowledges from beliefs, opinions, and feelings, but they each play significant parts in our everyday life and in designing. Perhaps, ‘knowing’ is a more valuable concept than knowledge here, as it encompasses active doing and a sense of what it is we use while engaged in designing (Downton, 2013).

Historical research into architectural designing cannot access what past designers thought, understood, and intended – this must mainly be imputed.

Mimicking methods of behavioural sciences in a quest for rigour, produces ‘objective’ (or at least hands off) examinations of what designers do – similar to watching from the outside, seeking evidence of the knowing of another species with which the researcher does not share a language. Both approaches contribute to our understandings, but only someone doing designing is party to first-hand knowing of 8

Peter Downton

their own practices. The sometimes redacted, purged and polished tales they tell are, however, suspected of only glancing connections with the actualities of what designers do and experience.

While there is no need for the term ‘design research’ (other than for respectability in some countries, and possibly concomitant access to funding), the concept appears to have generated an appropriate probing, predominantly in tertiary institutes, of what the processes of designing actually entail. When this is the case, and such self-scrutiny is done with care and thoroughness by individual architects, then what is revealed and understood can be incrementally assembled into knowledge within the discipline. This process has a powerful future if based on genuine accounts from designers of what they did or do, what they think they now know, and maybe why it matters. Direct reporting is required, devoid of the fashionable, frequently French, theoretical encrustations of the past forty years.

If architectural and other design knowledges are to be revealed as distinct from those of other disciplines, this will emerge from enquiries to ascertain overlaps and linkages between the knowledges and their use in the practices of different fields. The research reported in this volume, and that which evolves from such endeavours, will enable a fuller understanding of what distinguishes architectural thought and practice – I offer three areas that seem significant: First, the spatial intelligence of architects and the ways they have, and could, deploy this intelligence in practice. The extent and possibilities of this have been richly explored (Van Schaik, 2008).

Lynch, K (1977) Growing Up in Cities: Studies of the Spatial Environment of Adolescence in Cracow, Melbourne, Mexico City, Salta, Toluca and Warszawa. Cambridge, MIT Press/UNESCO. Robertson, C, Holley, M and Downton, P (1977) A Study of Techniques for Describing the Relationship Between People and the Residential Environment, Melbourne, University of Melbourne.

Downton, P (2013) Design Research: Revised Kindle Edition, chapters 4 to 7, Melbourne, EJP. Van Schaik, L (2008) Spatial Intelligence: New Futures in Architecture. Chichester, Wiley.

Second, the ways in which designers present their knowledge and the outcomes of their processes to their audiences. Architects operate in a culture of exhibiting, where disciplinary knowledge is disseminated, shared, nurtured, refined, and collectivised in studio presentations and critiques, presentations to clients, illustrated articles, blogs and lectures, through to curated exhibitions.

There are performative, verbal, written, graphic and modelled means of sharing the knowledges used and created. Up to a point others understand what is presented, but there is slippage and mis-comprehension paralleling other forms of communication such as speaking, dancing or photographing. However, this is what we use, and design research can be directed toward shaping and clarifying architects’ ways of telling tales to themselves and to others.

The often non-verbal ways architects bring things together – what they know, what they have borrowed, what others want and desire, is a third way of distinguishing designing. Can design research support such an assertion?

Practitioners’ ways of fabricating designed wholes are closely integrated with their individual knowing, and hence with collective disciplinary knowledge.

Peter Downton, July 2015.

Emeritus Professor of Architecture, RMIT University.

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Introduction

As articulated in recent publications, and on the evidence of postgraduate activity around the globe, design as the primary vehicle for research innovation in architecture has entered a confident and mature stage. This book documents and extends the outcomes of a symposium held at the 2014 Venice Biennale, which bought together many of those who have shaped the discourse and activity over the last ten years. The following chapters outline a range of perspectives on research through the medium of design. Deliberately brief, these set the scene for roundtable sessions, which have been transcribed and edited to further articulate current research: why it is of value and what are the ways, means and tactics by which these agendas can be progressed. Three round table panels – what matters, who cares, how – operated throughout the day, with the panels chairs reconvening in a plenary session.

What Matters What might a historical perspective reveal for design research? Where are the gaps in knowledge? What matters? These themes underpin two opening sections that collate contributions from theorists, historians and a range of contributors who are working within local contexts. The opening session for this table was led by Jonathan Hill, who located the autobiographical, the tradition of the novel and the dual role of drawings: The term ‘design’ derives from the Italian disegno, meaning drawing and suggesting both the drawing of a line and the drawing forth of an idea.

Historically, drawings as the medium for the projection of ideas, are interwoven with the complimentary role of the architectural text. Hill posits that the genre of the novel, grounded in fictional autobiography and diary writing, can be aligned with the spatial diary of the designer. Are designs inherently autobiographical? Such rhetoric allows a slippage into Ross Jenner’s essay, which elegantly addresses ‘the question of the question’ for architectural design research. His observation is that the apriori articulation of a question, central to the norms of research, would appear to be at odds with the state of perplexity / wonder desirable for artistic invention. Does research through design need to progress from a question? Extending Jenner’s parallel with the norms of research, does the question need to address a gap in knowledge?

Hill’s alignment of design, the autobiographical and the issue of authorship, might be explored in relation to the contribution by Sophia Psarra. Her examples from history – Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s design for the Venice hospital – are used to explore the interaction between authorship and self-organizing systems. In a similar vein Hannah Lewi looks to historical 10

Jules Moloney Simon Twose Jan Smitheram

precedent, citing the Smithson’s tactic of conceiving the architectural book as a form of building, in order to propose alternate tactics for the creative remapping of history and theory. While Jan Smitheram, through the lens of ethnography, also finds that pre-conscious and self-organizing patterns are prevalent in the design process.

What matters in the subsequent section was guided by session chair Murray Fraser, who after an all-encompassing definition of design research, articulated in his essay where activity might be productively engaged: Design research can best engender speculative thinking and experimentation through engagement with the normative practices of everyday life in the contemporary city.

The locus of research, according to this line of thinking, shifts from the individual and the monumental to the collective, commonplace activity of everyday life. In the context of urban design, Fraser sees globalization as crucial to 21st century research, albeit this is best conceived he argues, as a productive void akin to the Deluezian assemblage, rather than the binary oppositions of the local and the global.

Fraser’s articulation of the productive void of local needs, intertwined with global forces, is found within four essays in this session: Penny Allan and Huhana Smith have worked within the bi-cultural context of New Zealand to establish a third space where the productive transgression of cultural boundaries can evolve, such as the merging of the Māori tradition of hīkoi and the situationist tactics of Richard Long; Helen Norrie describes research that explores urbanism in the regional context of Tasmania where collaborative, locally situated projects reconceptualise what matters for small cities, using approaches that include historical lineages of modernism and play theory; for Pedro Mendes et al, the focus is Portuguese urbanism and the identification of projects that will enable social entrepreneurism to flourish; while Filipe Oliveira presents an architectural project that celebrates the aspirations of critical modernism and the local, through the symbolic intertwining of the Portuguese freedom singer José Afonso.

Who Cares Who is the audience for architectural research? Why is this agenda significant? Who cares? The next two sections bring together contributors who address these questions in the context of practice and academia. The first was chaired by Richard Blythe whose essay articulates three tiers of knowledge, crossing project, practice and practice community to set a rigorous framework to analyse how knowledge is created. In his view, the inherently non-linear, tacit and multiple aspects of practice become important agents, identifiable through a mapping of fascinations and urges: What is the urge that drives the practice?’ or, in other words, ‘What is the exedra to the specifics of individual projects that orients the designing and defines its intent, acknowledging that this intent may well remain tacit?

Tacit conditions surface in the four subsequent essays. Simon Twose discusses tacit understandings in drawing and building and argues for practice as a particular lens, providing an aesthetically imbued understanding of cities.

Understanding cities through design is also addressed by Mahanz Shah and Karina Moraes Zarzar, who highlight a vexed approach to historicity in contemporary design practices. They describe how an uncritical approach 11

to urban conservation supresses the contingent way it came about; design sensibilities from the seventeenth century becoming urban design canons in the twenty-first. The significance of design to solve problems of urban sprawl is addressed by Markus Jung, Maud Cassaignau & Mathew Xue who propose design strategies that engage risk and speculation to inform the future of cities.

Many questions orbit this session: who cares about the internal practices of designing? Do clients care? Stakeholders? Governing bodies? And, if it is the aesthetic practices of the architect that provide the key to new knowledge, how can these be articulated and disseminated?

The second of the 'Who Cares' themes considers how education intersects with these arguments, with chair Vivian Mitsogianni framing the design studio as a productive site for architectural ideas. Her essay on ‘uncertain conditions’ maps out connections between design research, education and wider contexts. She cites the pursuit of ideas as primary to design research in the academy, and argues that this speculative freedom gives the academy the power to challenge orthodoxy: The role of the academy is to facilitate experimentation in ways that challenge the apparent self-evident certainties and accepted orthodoxies of the discipline, the underlying assumptions about what architecture is and can contain and point to what it should do next.

This focus on the effectiveness of the academy is questioned by Donald Bates, who critiques the assumption that masters students conduct design research. He discusses the conflict between student research and the acquisition of professional competency and argues for severing the linkage between the two – if student work is to be considered research. Michael Jasper considers related themes and wonders how universities can be both sites for training as well as knowledge production. He expands on this through a case study, the Venice studios of Peter Eisenman, and argues for autonomy as the research value of the studio. In contrast Martin Bryant locates the value of the design studio in creativity and inter-disciplinarity, and goes on to discuss how exposure to thinking is peripheral to students’ focus, enabling them to diverge to more lateral and creative designing and hence more valuable design research. Marcus White also takes a trans-disciplinary approach and proposes a ‘three way’ between research, teaching and practice.

So, what are the constituent parts to conducting research in architecture?

Is the consistent thread an ever present will to form? A unique ability to bring multiple, messy criteria to aesthetic synthesis? And, if so, who cares?

How Recurrent within the essays aligned with ‘what matters’ and ‘who cares’, is the question of method. How? What are the ways, means and tactics for undertaking research through the medium of design? With the wholesale take up of digital design tools at the turn of the century, the ‘how’ question has developed a momentum of its own that continues to drive experimentation with both digital and analogue drawing. This table opened with session chair Nat Chard, whose essay raised a number of questions.

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Beyond the didactic condition of the studio in architectural schools, how can the architect undertake research in a way that develops tacit knowledge? When the issue is uncertainty, how can a drawing process or medium be developed to relate to the content with precision?

Chard addresses such issues in his own practice through the invention of unique drawing instruments, which problematize the picture plane with equal measure of rigor and uncertainty. Five contributors around the table provide complimentary takes on the sensibilities and tacit knowledge that underpin design research. Christopher French argues what is unique to architectural design research is the dual role of drawing as a site of "understanding and emergence". The essay by Tuba Kocaturk, Michael Biggs and Richard Koeck widens the discussion by, in effect, substituting the term ‘making’ and relating this to the more general context of design intelligence. Katrina Simon in her essay extends the agenda of drawing and making to that of cartography.

Through a series of case studies, she tactically extends cartographic techniques to produce images that "oscillate between picture, territory and map". The theme of cartography continues with the essay by Alfredo Ramirez and Clara Oloriz, where the scale shifts to that of the territorial assemblage. Concluding the session is the essay by Jules Moloney, who examines the question of ‘how’ in the context of preparing Masters students to undertake a 12 month design thesis. If the research emphasis is on designing, how might critical knowledge and skills on the ways and means available and tactics for their deployment be developed?

In the second 'How' session, the focus research shifts from the design studio to that of the performative context of curation and exhibition. Chaired

by Dorita Hannah, her essay set the scene for the discussion: Through my own collaborative practice of designing performative spatial exhibitions, I take on the role of curatorial provocateur in order to challenge the mimetic nature of exhibits and explore an interplay between the presentational, representational and re-presentational.

Threads of the collaborative practice of provocative curation are traced within four contributors, who have tabled projects that align to varying degrees with the agenda of curation and performance: Michael Jemtrud positions an ongoing project ‘Mobile Urban Stage’ in relation to the agency of design research, in order to challenge academic norms and foster interdisciplinary research; Bree Trevena and Mille Cattlin describe how the ‘ Testing Grounds’ project enabled the curation of multiple arts installations on a vacant public site, in order to challenge normative use of public space; Ivana Wingham locates how art, representation and technology come together through a "particular scenographic encounter"; while Anthony Burke describes how the competition ‘Open Agenda’ supports early career architects to translate design speculation to the public space of exhibition.

Next? It has been our pleasure to edit this collection of essays and dialogue on architectural design research. The perspectives are broad, insightful and stimulating – but what matters, who cares and how – remain open questions that will unfold into the next decade and beyond. This volume contributes to this agenda, locating trajectories that can be productively taken up, reinterpreted and extended by the reader / designer / theorist.

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