Design Research in Architecture

An Overview

Murray Fraser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351945103
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Arquitectura general

What is the role of design research in the types of insight and knowledge that architects create? That is the central question raised by this book. It acts as the introductory overview for Ashgate's major new series, 'Design Research in Architecture' which has been created in order to establish a firm basis for this emerging field of investigation within architecture. While there have been numerous architects-scholars since the Renaissance who have relied upon the interplay of drawings, models, textual analysis, intellectual ideas and cultural insights to scrutinise the discipline, nonetheless, until recently, there has been a reluctance within architectural culture to acknowledge and accept the role of design research as part of the discourse. However, in many countries around the world, one of the key changes in architecture and architectural education over the last decade has been the acceptance of design as a legitimate research area in its own right and this new series provides a forum where the best proponents of architectural design research can publish their work. This volume provides a broad overview on design research that supports and amplifies the different volumes coming out in the book series. It brings together leading architects and academics to discuss the more general issues involved in design research. At the end, there is an Indicative Bibliography which alludes to a long history of architectural books which can be seen as being in the spirit of design research.

INTRODUCTION

Murray Fraser

What is the role of design research in the types of insight and knowledge that architects create? That is the central question raised by this book. It is of course a huge subject, not least because of philosophical doubts about the concept of knowledge itself.¹ What does knowledge actually consist of? How can we prove that it is new? What is it able to do in the world? How does it relate to our brains and our bodies and our feelings? How does it operate as a collective social process? These kinds of deeper epistemological issues underlie the discussions in the book, which naturally will focus more directly on the subject of design research in architecture. For it is clear that architects have produced, are producing, and will continue to produce a wide spectrum of new insight and knowledge through their design ideas and design practices. Otherwise we cannot adequately explain why buildings vary so greatly, or why they have changed over time in such dramatic fashion. There are many external and internal influences on architectural knowledge, for sure, but what is equally certain is that new forms of insight and knowledge are continually being created. As such, architecture forms a genuine discourse and field of practice, even if it is also one in which there are a myriad of opinions, not least about how even to define what architecture is.

The most accepted mechanism for creating new insight and knowledge in any cultural or academic field, or for attempting to understand past or present or future conditions, is through research. There are many different theories and models for architectural research should be, several of which will be discussed by the contributors to this book. One could however just rely on the terminology adopted by official assessments of research quality in universities.

In the UK, the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) defines research as ‘a process of investigation leading to new insights, effectively shared’, while the equivalent process back in 2008 stated that research ‘is to be understood as original investigation undertaken in order to gain knowledge and understanding’.² Correspondingly, the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) classifies research, based on the 2002 Frascati Manual definition, as ‘the creation of new knowledge and/or the use of existing knowledge in a new and creative way so as to generate new concepts, methodologies and understandings. This could include synthesis and analysis of previous research to the extent that it is new and creative.’³ Some may find these types of definition far too simple for their tastes, but they do have the benefit of permitting a broad and heterogeneous vision of what can be classified as research. Design research in architecture is something which is most definitely included within the REF and ERA agendas, and so there is no reason why this should not apply elsewhere. It is certainly the view also of the Research Charter of the European Association for Architectural Education (EAAE), which openly welcomes design research into its framework: that document came about largely as the result of the efforts of Hilde Heynen and Johan De Walsche, while Johan Verbeke and I, and several others, helped with the drafting.

As a working definition, architectural design research can be described as the processes and outcomes of inquiries and investigations in which architects use the creation of projects, or broader contributions towards design thinking, as the central constituent in a process which also involves the more generalised research activities of thinking, writing, testing, verifying, debating, disseminating, performing, validating and so on. Adrian Forty has shown eloquently that architects have been deploying a combination of these modes of expression for a rather long time in their work.⁴ Likewise, design research as able to blend into other more established research methodologies in the arts, humanities and science, with no intrinsic antagonism. It is vital that the design element and these other modes of research activity and research methodology operate together in an interactive and symbiotic manner, with each feeding into the others throughout the whole process from start to finish. In turn this raises an important point about temporality, in that design research should never be something that just happens at the beginning of a project, as a sort of research and development stage, before the architect ‘lapses’ into more normative and routine productive modes. Indeed, architectural design research, if undertaken properly, is open to the full panoply of means and techniques for designing and making that are available to architects – including sketches, drawings, physical models, digital modelling, precedent analysis, prototyping, digital manufacture, interactive design, materials testing, construction specification, site supervision, building process, user occupation, user modification and such like. Architectural design research does not of course need to use all of these possibilities in every instance, but they indicate the sorts of techniques which ought to be brought into the frame.

Design research in architecture cannot however be conceived as synonymous with the immensely broad subject of architecture, or indeed of architectural practice; rather, it is a significant seam that runs through design work with a particular focus on the creation of new insight and knowledge. Here there is a useful parallel with practice-led research in the fine arts, as Jane Rendell has pointed out.⁵ She notes that compartmentalising the four main disciplinary approaches within architecture (building science, social science, humanities and art/design) works directly against what we realise is the multidisciplinary nature of architecture as a whole. Instead, Rendell believes that design research offers a means to bring these disciplinary strands together and also – importantly – for them then to be able to critique their own methodological assumptions. In this regard, architecture can learn a lot from the development of PhDs by Practice in other artistic fields. Yet while accepting that the influence of practice-led research in the fine arts is important, there are of course other approaches within architectural design research which stem from very different impulses, as the contribution here by Richard Blythe and Leon van Schaik makes abundantly clear. There are many types of research in design research, just as one can see there are many types of research in science or social science or history or fine art.

This then leads on to the issue of the methodology of design research. Other forms of research in architecture openly proclaim their methodological approach, for example science (repeatability) or history (transparency), while in social science, for instance, an articulation is made between theory-testing (deductive) and theory-building (inductive) approaches. Yet in each case, research methodology is not just a narrow matter of being rigorous and consistent and diligent. The importance of speculation and imagination to the scientist, or the social scientist, or the historian, is well testified. Hence the only difference with design research in architecture is a matter of degree, since in the latter – while borrowing where appropriate from the other, more established research methodologies – the creative aspect becomes the dominant part of the investigation, and to achieve that it has to introduce its own ideas of testing and evaluating, even in rather lateral or unexpected ways. Hence there is no methodological schism. As several contributors to this book point out, each of the other kinds of architectural research also rely on creative leaps and lateral thinking in their methodological process, if not nearly as much. In other words, the issue of the methodology of design research as a contested site – in that it clearly opens up a new paradigm of research – is one of its real strengths.

This degree of openness – both in the acceptance of design research as a valid activity and in what it involves as a practice – is of course extremely relevant for the focus of this book. We are interested here in how architects, through their design work and professional practice, carry out forms of research that produce their own particular kind of new insight and knowledge. In other words, they are engaged upon a research process that is noticeably different from, yet equal in value to, the kinds of insight and knowledge from natural scientists, social scientists, historians, geographers, humanities scholars and so on. It is essential to hold this catholic and tolerant view of design research, for if there has been a weakness in previous writings on design research in architecture, it was that they were far too defensive. In turn this caused writers to attempt to justify design research in terms of what it was not – mostly in relation to misconstrued or exaggerated notions of objectivity in the natural sciences – rather than trying to say what it actually was.

There will be none of this defensiveness or apologia in this book. This is because there seems no real argument any more that design research in architecture exists, or that it possesses its own rigour and relevance. An elegant dissection of the hitherto false polarisation between ‘design’ and ‘research’ has been provided by David Leatherbarrow.⁶ He calls instead for a more confident yet more modest view of design research in which both words are seen not as opposites, but as projective undertakings equally rooted in uncertainty and contingency, and thus needing constantly to oscillate between past, present and future conditions. ‘Project making in architecture is no more certain of its outcome than research in modern sciences’, notes Leatherbarrow, ‘…[so] when the actual methods of scientific research are kept in mind, and their similarity to project making understood, architecture’s membership in the research community ceases to be a question’.⁷ Therefore anyone who still continues to doubt the existence or relevance of design research is a Flat Earther. As noted, the value of design research in general has been demonstrated by its ready adoption – along with concomitants such as PhDs by Design or by Practice – in other cultural fields such as the fine arts, design or music, which indeed in many countries are more advanced in terms of the acceptance design research than in architecture. In the UK, for example, there were a number of groundbreaking art schools in the early 1990s where PhDs by Practice were inaugurated: Adrian Rifkin at Leeds University was just one of these founding tutors. Another recent sign of this maturity in other cultural fields is The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, which sets a precedent for architecture to meet.⁸ Perhaps this is because these artistic fields are less involved in, and less worried about, living up to ideals of scientific objectivity, or maybe there is just a stronger intellectual and cultural lag in architecture because it is a professionally regulated discipline. Nonetheless, there have been some notable outposts of design research in architecture since the mid-1990s, the best known proponents of which – Jonathan Hill from the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London, and Leon van Schaik at RMIT University in Melbourne – have willingly contributed chapters to this book. As such, they have already done much to prove the value of the approach, even if, perhaps predictably, they hold different views on the path that design research should take.

Whatever the historical backdrop, what is now crucial is to map out a terrain of what design research in architecture might encompass. This is perhaps the key task for this present book, operating as it does as a companion volume to the Ashgate book series – also entitled ‘Design Research in Architecture’ – which I am co-editing with Jonathan Hill, Jane Rendell and Teddy Cruz. Over the course of the next few years, the aim of our parallel book series is to provide space for practicing architects/academics who are engaged in design research to present and discuss their ideas and projects, all in a spirit that is deliberately open geographically, intellectually and aesthetically. There are countless ways to undertake architectural design research, and in that sense this book offers a taster, or sampler, for the Ashgate book series in general.

What, then, can we say design research in architecture should be about? It is not the aim here to be at all didactic or proscriptive, or in any way limiting – not least because it is such a young, emerging field. We need more architects and academics to get involved in ever more intensive ways, and a sense of freedom and opportunity has to be one of the most attractive features of architectural design research. Just as for much of history it would have been unthinkable for architects to wish to become experts in designing working-class housing, or become experts in low-carbon sustainable design, then today the conceptual challenge is for them to become experts in how architecture produces its own insight and knowledge – and its particular forms of practice – through design research. In some senses this is linked to Donald Schön’s text on the ‘reflective practitioner’ as an agent within the creative industries, even if many authors have suggested that we actually need a more dynamic and engaged model of design practice – often signalled by the use of the term ‘praxis’ as a condition which is far more critically engaged and socially proactive.⁹ Hence we need to view design research as something distinct from Schön’s ‘reflective practitioner’, not least because the latter does not fully take into account the vital processes of knowledge creation in architecture. Some rather obvious and crucial questions arise at this point. Is design research in architecture something that is already inherent in architectural practice, and simply needs to be identified and articulated in the public realm? Or is it something that still needs to be created anew, as a kind of step-change in the way in which architects/academics conceive of and produce their designs? The earliest prognoses for design research in the 1960s and 70s tended to be written by advocates of what were either termed ‘design methods’, such as Geoffrey Broadbent or John Christopher Jones, or of systems theory and cybernetics, like Gordon Pask or Ranulph Glanville, which often tended to tip over into ‘design science’.¹⁰ In retrospect, these efforts tended to lead us into blind alleys, or else towards organisations such as the Design Research Society, which for most architects offers too narrow a focus to be of much relevance to them.¹¹ More appealing is the now legendary essay by Christopher Frayling on research in arts and design, in which he spoke of research ‘for’, ‘through’ or ‘into’ design.¹² Some of the contributors to this book deal more explicitly with Frayling’s essay, so I will refrain from going into it here. Suffice to say that his essay is also notable for being picked up and developed by those who from the 1990s were amongst the first to write in a more concerted fashion about architectural design research – the best known include Bryan Lawson in the UK, Peter Downton in Australia and Halina Dunin-Woyseth in Norway.¹³ If there has been a limitation in these texts, however, it is the relative degree of abstraction – even separation – from actual specific design projects and practices through which architects engage in design research as a fully integrative process.

A different problem, which lies at precisely the opposite end of the scale, is when an aesthetic agenda controls the analysis too much, and the will to form takes over. In such cases, design research seems more about defending a style, as a kind of aesthetic determinism that gets too close to the limitations of ‘design methods’ or ‘design science’. It is a regrettable tendency which is partly due to the continuing influence of the avant-garde myth of architects as socially detached form-creators and innovative geniuses. The irony recently is that this type of writing on design research is often linked to the use of advanced computer-aided-design techniques such as parametric modelling, of which adherents – such as Michael H...