Interdisciplinary Research Methods in Architecture

Sophie Linnéa Rose

RESEARCH PHILOSOPHY FOR DESIGN P30026 RESEARCH M ETHODS DI ARY 6 December 2013

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CONTENTS Diagrams Page 7 Writing architecture Page 13 Wanderlust Page 17 Participatory Methods Page 25 The Archive Page 29 Collage Page 33 Video page 45 Fieldwork page 53 City in the City page 57 Critical Essay Page 58 Lecture Notes Page 62 Bibliography Page 71

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Research Philosophy in Design.

Research Methods Diary

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Diagrams.

Week 1.

Mitch Miller produces Dialectograms, which are a series of documentary/ pychogeographic drawings of areas in the city of Glasgow which are marginal territories, soon to be forgotten or under treat. Using a graphic art style of recording spaces, Miller extracts and documents moments of exchange and points of interest in small spaces. Giving myself a time limit of twenty minutes per dialectogram, I set about recording three spaces or interaction, which produced a series of sketchy illustrations of the contents, activities and conversations of the specific spaces I encounter in my everyday.

Miller’s Dialectogram scourced from: http://dialectogram.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/3-mecca-bingoblog.jpg

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Dialectogram 1: The Vaults and Garden Cafe, Oxford.

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Dialectogram 2: Oxford Golden Cross Entrance, Oxford:

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Dialectogram 3: Pigeon House Yard, Church Hanborough

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Autogram 1: Birmingham.

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Writing Architecture.

Week 2.

Writing architecture uses the disciplines of Narration, Graphic Novels and Autobiography to encounter space. “Site-writing is what happens when discussion concerning sitespecificity extend to involve criticism, and the spatial qualities of the writing become as important in conveying meaning as the content of the criticism�

(Rendell, 2011, pg. 38)

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The emergency exit door to the building site had been left ajar and, intoxicated with the same thought, we both swayed towards it moving slowly through the newly laid stones which shifted in the wet cement under our feet - we were careless and transfixed.

Standing in front of the door, which was layered with protective plastic, for a moment we joked and giggled and then slowly pushed the door open. Quietly moving through the dark with one hand on their upper arm, I orientated myself with an apprehensive left hand along the edge of the space which felt polished and new under my fingertips. The floor felt fragile and produced a dull, slow thudding under our feet as we edged one slow step after another through the building. As we trespassed the space, I started to smell the recently cut wood and synthetic tang of new carpeting; the dull haziness of the previous hours had been flushed away and replaced with a heightened sense of consciousness.

Suddenly, the building detected its intruders and the light sensors triggered a programmed chain reaction of bright white lights which burst down the corridor in domino effect which aroused the vast space under the stark lights. Almost instantly after this display, overcome with excitement and enchanted by the encounter; we burst through the buildings corridors, tearing off our clothes as we noisily ran, the building shaking under our feet and the echoes of our loud footsteps bounced against the walls which animated the building. We fell through doors to rooms that lit up at our presence and then after a satisfying glance we swiftly moved onto discover the next space, eventually running in to a large glass atrium where we were presented with a view of a sandstone building which glowed in the faint purple-yellow sun of the new day. Out of breath and laughing, we lingered at the edge of the atrium exposed by the interior lights of the building and gazed through the glass at the view for a few moments.

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Wanderlust.

Week 3.

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Roundabout Journey Games Map

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The critic Robert MacFarlane offers a good beginner’s guide to the ambiguities of psychogeography. His simple instructions involved: 1.

Take a map of a city.

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Placing a wine glass on top of it and use it to draw a circle .

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Then walk as closely as possible to the route that has been traced the walker records what is observed - graffiti, heritage plaques, architectural oddities - and what the psychological associations the environments trigger.

Taking a tourist map of the city of Birmingham and implementing this game into the urban environment creates a playful tactic which demands a specific movement through the city and this directly challenges its arrangement. This process encourages the walker to view the city critically as they encounter and confront borders and buildings that attempts to divert the explorer from their personal journey and this type of movement through the city turns the passive walker into an active observer which is valuable in creating critical observations of space.

The exploration along the three circles of the map provides for journey which highlights the instanced in which the city subconsciously divides the passive walker is highlighted in the information gathering technique to generate a series which produces a series of photographic works that attempts to communcated the journeys emotional and geographical experience.

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Glass Screens Bollards Highrise Walkways

‘Protective’ Borders Border Confrontation Site Choreography

Roundabout Journey 1: Recorded Territories.

Desire Spaces

Roundabout Journey 2: Fits of Pleasure.

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Oxford City walking Map which highlights small instances of picturesque encounters

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Participatory Methods.

Week 4.

The Mysteries of Old Peking is a game which is a tool to explore what cultural and social activates can be introduced to the city of Oxford by the Chinese minority group which can be used as a tool to educate and encourage participation among the existing demographics.

The board game represents various activities under the following headings: - Food and Drink.

- Arts and Crafts.

- Market.

- Festivities.

- Sport.y - Well Being.

- Entertainment.

In order to understand which activities and events would be most popular in Oxford, the game encourages the player to make personal choices in which determines their journey across the board therefore the areas which presents the most popular happenings will naturally be populated by the player tokens which are left by the player by landing on them. There are also blank spaces where suggestion cards available so that the players of the game can contribute in exchange for a fortune cookie as well as play it. If an activity space accumulates more than 2 tokens for a single player, the space is now pronounced as open to the public. The aim of the game is to attempt to open as many places of valuable experience by placing tokens across the games board in a limited amount of rolls of the dice.

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The Archive.

Week 5.

Definition of an Archive: (usually archives) - a collection of historical documents or records providing information about a place, institution, or group of people: [as modifier]: a section of archive film - the place where historical documents or records are kept: they were allowed to study in the archives - a complete record of the data in part or all of a computer system, stored on an infrequently used medium.

(Sourced:http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/archive)

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The documents are a record of the horses date of birth and physical features so that he could be identified. The montage includes an image of a chunk of his tail hair which was a significant feature of the animal.

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Abstract Scent Extraction Diagram.

Inspired by scentography, a process which motivated the activity of extracting the smell carried in the horse hair so that it can be archived and therefore enjoyed, motivated the archiving topic of smell which is a conceptual idea which aims to reproduce precise aromas of intimate memories. The memory of smell is subjective and therefore the reproductions of smell memories are personal.

Scento-graphy images scourced from: http://www.amyradcliffe.co.uk

The abstract diagram above shows the basic process of extracting the aroma from the hair using steam which is extracted as vapour and then condensed to ultimately produce the smell in a container which is the final step to archiving the scent and therefore archiving the memory of the animal.

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Collage.

Week 7.

Collage

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Collage 3: New Space

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Collage 4: Weaving Experiment

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Collage 1: Deconstruct THIS.

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Architect Pierre Koenigs 1960 Stahl House by Julius Shulman.

Everyday California by Julius Shulman.

Through out his career Julius Shulman uses collage to carefully superimpose human activity into modern homes which promoted the careers of numerous architects of the 20th Century. Shulmans scenes showcased the modern, postwar optimism of architecture and his images continue to represent the attraction and livability of modern architecture and the opulence of the California dream. This method of collage in Deconstruct THIS criticizes the implementation of human beings into the product which attempts to create an atmosphere which ultimately endeavors to make the vision more humanist and there for more appealing. The process involved overlying masking tape and block colour paints which helped to form the clean lines which are celebrated in modernism, then the collage is essentially deconstructed as the masking tape is pulled away yet, by superimposing the human activity, the page appears to have architectural qualities.

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Collage 2: Byproduct.

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Photographs of process of deconstruction and consrtuction.

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Collage 7: Interior Exploration

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Robert Adam’s 1761 ‘section’ of the Great Hall at Syon House.

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Collage 5: The Banal City

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Collage 6: Fits of Pleasure in Birmingham

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Video.

Week 8.

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This movie depicts the process of moving through the university’s premises towards the library in the University of Oxford Brookes. The intention was to observe several elements such as the interactions, obstacles, transitions, momentum, stasis and flow between the users and architecture. In this short film practical obstacles like steps and barriers and the users interaction with it are shown. We mainly focused on the lower body and its response to it’s immediate obstacles. Along with the physical obstacles which were encountered on the journey to the libary, we created a deliberate obstacle ourselves through the small gesture of leaving the camera on a tripod in a hallway and observed it from a distance. The camera was not aimed at the people and it did not create a physical obstacle but when the footage is analyzed more in detail, you can notice that the camera created a fictive barrier.

Most people’s body language tells us that they are not sure how to act when they pass by the camera and you can recognize an amount of uncertainty and self-consciousness in their behavior. Another impetus of this process was to identify the diagrammatic possibilities, which could be explored through video and post-processing. Editing the footage is accompanied with a conscious awareness in deciding what is to be preserved, represented and discarded and therefore the process of re-evalutating the unedited footage is essential to research as it can also be revealing.

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Stills from first video footage which demonstrates part of the process of turning the corner.

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The process of turning a corner on a street or moving round a bend in the urban environment can be a very interesting moment in time and the memories of this moment can be just as transient as the space itself and particularly if the individual is in the protective bubble of a car. Video can be used as a tool help to illustrate the journey through this time and space and can be used as a way of reflecting and re-evaluating minutes and even seconds of these undetected instances. To record and explore the process of turning a corner in the urban landscape I attached a Go-pro camera on the passenger side of the car which created a dual view of the pavement, the forward space in front of the camera an the backwards view which was reflected in the wing mirror. Although the views offered in the recordings are reasonably distorted, the Go-pro camera offers no preview of the footage that is recorded and this meant that it was necessary to instinctively experiment with the angles of the camera throughout the jour-

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Stills from the video footage which describes the front and back views as the vehicle turns a corner.

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Fieldwork.

Week 9.

Ethnography cultivates and explores concepts of the every day under geography and using writing which develops scientific accounts of peoples cultures which considers human beings customs, traditions and mutual differences.

Designing and Conducting Ethnographic Research Margaret

by Diane LeCompte, Jean J. Schensul Image sourced from page 138.

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Questions within the Question: •

What is meant by the meaning of ‘use’?

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Who uses the Quad?

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What do they use the space for?

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Who is the Quad meant for?

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Private/public aspect – people being ‘allowed in’. Have these ideas been brought to the contemporary colleges?

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Where are the meeting points?

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What are the rules of ‘quad etiquette’?

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What was the historical development of the quad in Oxford and what was its significance in the past?

• What was the purpose of the traditional quad and how does it fit into the contemporary building?

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How many collages will let you be there when you want? How will this affect the research boundaries?

What information is needed to answer the questions?

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A wide range of personal and impersonal information in the approaches to the Oxford quad which can be found in novels, films and biographic texts.

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Interviews with students, tourists and fellows: How do they perceive meaning in the old and the contemporary quads. Make an analysis of this.

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Interview porters – who do they allow in and who do they reject?

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Past and present photographs which compare the quads.

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Historical literature paintings and architectural plans.

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Activities of the quad and what do the activities mean?

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Structural plans, material, and details of the building.

Where can the information be found?

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Source from the Bodleian library.

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Interviews.

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Walk through photography of the space.

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Talk to all the users of the space. Dons, students, the delivery man etc.

Magdalen College

University College

All Souls Research

Oriel

Corpus Cristi

Brasenose

Christ Church College

LincolnCollege

Balliol

Pembroke

Regents Park

Nuffield College

St. Johns College

Wadham College

Oxford Martin School

Bodleian Library

Queens College

St Edmund Hall

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City in the City.

Week 10.

Aims of Parkour: -

Discipline of movement.

Learning to move freely.

Overcoming different obstacles.

Increasing mental and physical capabilities.

Body Conditioning.

Working to personal strengths.

Non=competitive

ê r u o rt p

fo e r t “ê

”

ile t u e tr

Images scourced from: http://www.oxfordparkour.co.uk/

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Research Philosophy in Design.

Research Methods Critical Essay. Question 1.

In exploring the development of methods and processes of research in design, it is important to discuss the role of the established methods of ‘interdisciplinary’ approached in the modern architectural environment. ‘Interdisciplinary’ is a word which has dominated part of the architectural world in the recent decades and has encouraged practices to appropriate the relationship between design and art which has meant that philosophy, literature, history, psychoanalysis and so on now forms part of its school of thought. However, creating the notion that two fields of focus can come together to produce new perspectives of architectural and social conditions what now appears to be slowly surpassed by the novel form of ‘transdisciplinary’ approaches which intends to go beyond working across the established fields of interdisciplinary architecture practices.

The fundamental difference between the two terms is the way in which the individual researchers interact with each other for a creative output; interdisciplinary methods aims to the inform and compare individual findings whereas transdisciplinary integrates and transforms various disciplines to respond to a single project. These contrasts highlight the holistic approach to transdisciplinary methods of research and therefore, the question remains of whether their true value can be obtained in working across disciplines that creates an accessible and undefined manner of research.

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Research philosophy of walking specifies a primitive method which explores landscapes through desire and impulse and, when used as a process to understand the urban environment, can produce unique and critical physical assessments through mapping and cultural evaluations by documenting the journey. The event of walking is viewed as passive exploration of the city, and this in itself is unique as it allows the wanderer to experience pure encounters with the environment and to resists preconceived ideas of places and thus produces an authentic experience of space. It was important to approach the three walking games in Birmingham in different manners to understand how a state of critical awareness while walking can have an impact on the outcome of the research. In reference to Crouch, Chriopher Jones’s observations about the negative effects of solving problems through design is highlighted: “Perhaps the most obvious sign that we need better methods of designing and planning is the existence, in industrial countries, of massive unsolved problems that have been created by the use of man-made things... these need to be regarded as accidents of nature, or as acts of God, to be passively accepted; they can instead be thought of as human failures to design for conditions brought about by the products of designing” (Jones, 191, pg. 31)

Roundabout Journey number 1 consisted of approaching and documenting the urban spectrum in a critical manner which confronts and documents fragmented parts of the city of Birmingham by the excessive use of boundary cotrol which ranged from choreographing the city scape to enclosing the public Christmas tree with a ‘protective’ barrier. This approach in walking actively questions the existing conditions of the space which can be used as a tool to explore the role of the research question. In contrast, the Roundabout Journey number 2, documented again through photography, is a passive walking experience which records points of natural interest and desire, a subjective view that could be used to frame problems, questions and resolutions.

Comparing these two approaches to walking as a research method highlights Roundabout Journey 1 as fragmentary representing of culture that communicates a scientific approach to research, on the other hand the rambling tone of the Roundabout Journey 2 depicts a more emotional response to the existing environment through the detection of provocative spaces. To conclude, the two experiences of the walking journeys suggests how a transdiciplinary method such as walking can be modified to produce a more scientific research approach to introduce proper conduct, ordering and self-control during research, thus making the method of walking more manageable and appealing in an interdisciplinary fashion.

Architectural collage takes the fine-art technique of deconstruction and repetition to embody 3D spaces on a 2D medium and this process of forming spaces in this manner has been the inspiration of many architectural interventions. In the experimental developed surface technique in order to produce ‘Collage 7: Interior’, explored the selective layering process as a tool to research the significance of certain textural and spatial elements of the apartment through it’s arrangements transferred into an artistic experience.

This artistic positioning of the image as a mode of representing space meant that a narrative on how the space is used was being communicated and therefore the significance of the routines of the apartment is communicated as a flow of conscious imagery that enriches the incommunicative sketch floor plans.

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Collage can also be explored as narrative that critiques itself through the formation of a carefully reconstructed question, which is extracted from current newspapers to reformulate new and current values. Using this form to represent situations, Collage 5: The Banal City aims to question the valued experience of the expanding city and there is an attempt to emphasize this using the juxtaposition of the amusing quote “fat chance of an elephant sighting� in a static arrangement of imagery. The process of collage as a drafting and redrafting method of arrangement of space research helps to communicate research concepts and the method being closely linked to the art world, means that these explorations can often not only investigate the understanding of space but also explores the perception of aesthetic qualities.

The independent research undertaken in Collage 1: Deconstruct This explores the process of manufacturing a 3D space using steps of adding masking tape as guides to manipulate the fine-art method of painting and how erasing these guides produces an environment that resist the 3D space. This process of creating this image was a development of a research question; what makes a 2D space appear architectural?

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The collage itself suggests the significance of implementing human activity into the 2D to produce the 3D and this process and sets out a focus of research. One issue raised by researching through collage arrangements which can be seen in the more personal approach to communicating an experience through Collage 6: Fits of Pleasure in Birmingham demonstrated personal modes of knowledge produced which uses the discipline of collage as a tool to represent a personal study which may seem threatening to the interdisciplinary with possibilities of incompetence through personal artistic viewpoints.

Using video as a method of researching environments allows an exploration into the movement of the body through space and time which can be captured in three ways. The first approach can be implemented into architecture as a systematic data collection tool, the second as an analysis tool which studies motion and the third as a sketch tool to reform compositions.

The video study of the movement of the body of the car through the urban space explores the motion of transition through in between spaces from two perspectives which encompasses the idea of revolutionizing the discipline.

Using film as a tool to explore the perspectives or turning corners when in a car allowed for different perspectives to be formed which distance itself from the customary way that research might approach. The process of reflecting and re-evaluating the collected footage formed part of the process of discovery in the sequence of experience which can be collected through a series of stills that highlight a pattern or instance which would have otherwise been overlooked. It is in the unedited footage that the research question arises to inform a focus for further ideas of investigation.

Julia Kristeva argues that interdisciplinary approaches to research is flawed as it lacks the ambiguity of roles which helps to encourage people to work out of their discipline and therefore establishes a hierarchy which forms parts of a disciplined learning system.

“Interdisciplinarity is always a site where expressions of resistance are latent.

Many academics are locked within the specificity of their field: that is a fact . . . the first obstacle is often linked to individual competence, coupled with a tendency to jealously protect one’s own domain. Specialists are often too protective of their own prerogatives, do not actually work with other colleagues, and therefore do not teach their students to construct a diagonal axis in their methodology.”

(Coles & Defert 1997. pp. 3-21)

The ritual of interdisciplinary tactics in architecture are permanently absorbed with practice’s across art, architecture and theory however transdisciplinary research allows participants in the research to surpass their own disciplines to inform one another’s work, which emphasizes the importance of working through continuous learning and evaluation of processes.

Traditionally, art has been used as a tool of researching space, however perhaps the representational feature of the fine-art tactic of collage proves to be limiting as a method of research and it is in exploring the transdisciplinary perspective in research that may prove valuable in observational approaches. This returns us to Chriopher Jones’s previous observations of the man-made which captures the complexity of “design for conditions brought about by the products of designing” and perhaps this condition can be avoided in future by continuous exploration of the value of transdiscplinary create variety in approaches to research which means that the architectural fraternity can persist explorative instead of confined by the role of disciplines.

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Lecture Notes

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