Design Innovation for the Built Environment

Research by Design and the Renovation of Practice

Michael Hensel, Michael U. Hensel, Michael Hensel, Michael U. Hensel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136473531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Today architecture and other fields in the built environment face the steep task of answering complex questions pertaining to sustainability, performance, and adaptability.

• How are these disciplines to accomplish these difficult tasks at such an immense pace?
• How might architectural practice renovate itself accordingly?

Worldwide it is becoming increasingly clear that different modes of research are emerging which are triggered directly by the need to renovate practice. One significant prevailing mode is what has come to be known as 'research by design'.

This book delivers an overview of this pluralistic domain. Bringing together a range of leading architects, architectural theorists, and designers, it outlines the developments in current practice from leading individuals based in the USA, UK, Australia, Japan and Europe. Edited by a recognized expert, this book exposes the undercurrent of research, which is taking place and how this will contribute to the renovation of architectural practice.

Chapter 1

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The project of design
research

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David Leatherbarrow

The general system of the sciences and the arts is a kind of labyrinth, a twisting road, which the mind enters without really knowing the route it ought to take.

Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Encyclopédie (Paris, 1751)

The external conditions which are set for [the scientist] by the fact of experience do not permit him to let himself be too much restricted in the construction of his conceptual world by the adherence to an epistemological system. He, therefore, must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist.

Albert Einstein (Schilpp 1951: 683)

Science knows no bare facts at all … the facts that enter our knowledge are already viewed in a certain way and are, therefore, essentially ideational.

Paul Feyerabend (Feyerabend 2010: 3)

If design research in architecture is to amount to more than a slogan used by professionals advertising their services or professors seeking promotion, if it is to inaugurate a renewal of architecture's cultural role and a redefinition of its disciplinary task, then the nature of the project it proposes needs to be clarified. When any new theme activates a flurry of discussion, one always wonders if interest will fade just as quickly as it surfaced, either because its ideas are not really new or its promises are unrealistic. But even if this were the case, it would still be necessary to understand the origin of the fashion and the prestige of the promise.

Among architects and educators today, the proposal for design research is generally understood as follows: the design of buildings is not only a professional practice but also a form of inquiry, a sister or brother in the growing family of research disciplines at work in the world today. The older siblings are well known, the highly regarded research fields in the natural sciences: physics, chemistry, and biology, for example. In the next generation are the social sciences: economics, political science, and sociology. Also related are the fields in which the basic sciences are applied: medicine, engineering, and law. This last group is more akin to architecture, for these academic disciplines are also professions. The problem with architecture is that it also has family ties to disciplines beyond the sciences, in painting, urban design, and landscape architecture, even literature and poetry. Furthermore, artistic practices are not only non-scientific, they are purposeless; beauty is its own reward – at least according to modern aestheticians. But these categories – natural science, social science, the arts – together with the terms that designate them are no less subject to debate and misuse than the words ‘design’ and ‘research’ with which we began.

Design research: a contradiction in terms?

One reason that the notion of design research appears to be new in architecture is that these two terms seem to pose a contradiction, at least when long-standing conceptions are allowed. Each activity would seem to have different objects, methods, and times.

Considering its objects, design is the means by which something new is brought into being. Like work, it involves effort, but unlike tasks that are performed repetitively, design's labour is essentially progressive, advancing beyond current conditions rather than stabilizing or reaffirming what is already given. Moreover, design work couples manual with intellectual effort, in ways that repetitive kinds of work often do not; production follows preconception. The opposite seems to be true of research. The objects into which research inquires are presumed to exist at the beginning of the investigation, even if their existence is only hypothesized. While the facts of the case may be hidden, research presumes they can be discovered because they are already there, waiting to be found, then documented, for others, at present and in future. For discoveries to be made, researchers must follow leads, probing overlooked conditions, seeing beyond distractions. They must also free themselves from prejudgments. Research methods are meant to open inquiry to the phenomena themselves. But unlike the outcomes of design productivity, these phenomena do not derive from the research process. Observation is not generation.

The procedures by which design and research reach their goals also suggest their incompatibility. Design invention authors originals; its outcomes are stamped with the sign of the new. Admittedly, study, thought, and experiment sometimes set the stage for innovative work, but lessons from the past neither fore-shadow nor predetermine groundbreaking proposals. Imagination of unforeseen possibilities advances design's operations. It proceeds by acts of will, as if by fiat, strengthened by firm conviction and enlivened by inspiration. Research, by contrast, is nothing if not methodical, requiring prolonged and careful study. If one takes the natural sciences as a model, the procedures of serious research are worked out in advance; its inquiries follow a plan. Moreover, a basic sense of objectivity governs its steps, so that other researchers can follow the same procedures and reach the same conclusions. The validity of outcomes rests upon a thesis of non-subjectivity and transparent communication. Research today involves teamwork. Just as observation in research is not meant to be generative, its methods are never internalized. Passion may drive research, but it is never as personal as creative expression.

The third reason that design and research seem to resist one another is that each operates in a different timeframe: design's advances move into the future, while research resides in the present. A bridge between the not yet and the now can be built if design's productivity is construed as planning, if the future is drawn back into the present, or seen as a set of arrangements that have been made in advance of its beginning. But we have stressed the contrary: design is not planning, or not always and only that; it ventures into the subjunctive, toward a horizon of possibilities, and does so imaginatively. Research, on the other hand, holds its ground. It makes no claims on times to come because it is sharply attuned to what is given here and now, particularly what is given beneath or behind appearances, the real facts of the case. Because now and then are distinct moments, research and design seem to be irreconcilable practices.

Modification and discovery

Were these opening comments a summary of actual practices occurring today, one would conclude that the prospect for design research is not particularly encouraging. Yet neither account is accurate. Although commonplace, they caricature both practices. Design never proceeds by fiat and research is never disinterested. The possibilities envisaged in creative practice are only persuasive when they can be understood as real possibilities. The observational work of disciplined research represents genuine insight when it discovers phenomena that were previously unknown. Finally, while invention in architecture always intends conditions that do not exist at present, the spaces and settings that result always retain elements and qualities that predate the project. Even the most progressive patterns of inhabitation always transform past practices.

Two terms that are relatively familiar in architecture – modification and discovery – should help us get closer to the actual practices of design and research and to see the real possibilities of their cooperation.

‘No new architecture can arise without modifying what already exists’ (Gregotti 1996: 67). Any of the essential topics of architectural design – the site, programme or construction materials – can be understood as the ‘what already exists’ that is subject to modification. Insofar as the work is to be built, for example, it must be built somewhere, in some place that precedes the project, with some materials that were available to construction before it commenced. Work on an existing site and with existing materials always involves the alteration of subject matter that bears the stamp of the anterior, even if it is so recent a past that it seems contemporary. Furthermore, some aspects of the subject matter drawn into the project's beginning persist through its realization. The alterations to which sites and materials are subjected never change them beyond recognition. Even if the slope of the soil is levelled, subsurface conditions persist. Similarly, timber that is sawn, sanded, and stained still shows its grain. The sorts of change that result from construction can be significant but never absolute. The same is true for program modification. New works can certainly offer new types of accommodation, but these provisions will only be sensible if they are sufficiently familiar to invite appropriation. The inevitability of modification is especially evident in urban architecture, for primary topics of design, such as frontality and orientation, are conferred upon the project as much as they result from it. The thesis of modification is neither a constraint on invention nor a restriction on divergence; in fact it requires the latter as the measure of the project's particularity.

What modification is to design, discovery is to research. Research brings into visibility what it observes. Only an unwarranted act of faith would assume that the subject matter of such discoveries predates the investigation. Evidence of this point is amply supplied by modern science. Experimental procedures in modern science do not confirm theories as much as they perform them. Research today is not understood as the dispassionate observation of empirical phenomena. Scientific study is a controlled form of participation in a process of discovery and disclosure. One well-known version of performative science is the thesis of ‘constructive realism’ (Wallner 1994; Spaulding 1918). The practising scientist does not describe phenomena but contributes to their construction. Truth is not observed and then documented but approximated, according to conditions that vary. Fritz Wallner has written: ‘we understand what we have constructed. We cannot understand anything else’ (Wallner 1994: 23). Because this thesis has close affinities with the eighteenth-century arguments of Giambattista Vico, we should not be surprised to discover that, despite long-standing assumptions about ‘objectivity’, it has been a basic premise of three centuries of modern science.

Research yesterday and today

Today's wide enthusiasm for research in all fields is rooted in a long tradition. For two centuries, centres of learning have turned from doctrina to research. The recent and periodic calls for the restoration of canonical studies attest to the overwhelming movement in the opposite direction. The battle-cry for university reform announced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in the late eighteenth century signalled an offensive that has been victorious on all fronts. He defined the replacement of inherited wisdom by research as ‘the transition to [a] science which has not yet been completely discovered’ (Gadamer 1992: 48). Professors still teach, but a university's greatness is measured by the volume and quality of its research output. While the transmission of knowledge is necessary in higher education, it is insufficient for society's greatest need: the advancement of learning.

But the renunciation of academic learning has occurred outside universities, too. The most strident claims for new beginnings made by early modernist architects included an attack on academicism. Le Corbusier's condemnation of the academy is perhaps the most well known. Chapter One of Precisions announced a decisive preliminary for all who seek a new architecture: ‘To Free Oneself Entirely From Academic Thinking’ (Le Corbusier 1991: 24ff.). Promising a ‘new spirit’ for the ‘new world’ (the Americas), he described his programme of study as the result of twenty-five years of ‘step by step research’ (Le Corbusier 1991: 25). That he was promoting a ‘doctrine’ had to be admitted, but he maintained that his findings were open to examination, built up in accordance with the laws of logic, and arrived at with no regard to received wisdom. His first step – ours, too – involved quitting ‘the pillow of ancient habits’ so that he could ‘go into the unknown to forge a new attitude for thought.’ This meant shaking himself free from the ‘ruling and omnipotent mechanism of [the] academies.’ How had they obtained such a tight grip? By offering security of knowing in a time of transition. So that we would be clear on what to avoid, he outlined the basic characteristics of the academician: (1) the person who does not judge by himself, (2) the one who accepts results without verifying causes, (3) who believes in absolute truths, and (4) the one who does not involve his own self in the question being asked. The fourth characteristic is most debilitating, for acting in accordance with slogans and submission to the constraint of the academies suffocates the creative spirit. The engineer is the preferred alternative, the patient researcher who observes phenomena, analyses them, and then calculates. Although he never suggested this type of practice would be sufficient for architecture, he did describe his studio as l'atelier de la recherché patiente. In truth, however, his image of himself at work oscillated between scientist, artist, and monk.

The modern approach to design research did not begin in the twentieth century, nor did the movement away from received wisdom. Both can be seen in the late seventeenth century. Already at that time the academies promoted the kind of inquiry we associate with science: observation, description, logical inference, and disinterested investigation. Rejecting pathetic appeals to ancient learning, Claude Perrault criticized the ‘docility of men of letters’ for their ‘spirit of submission ingrained in their way of studying and learning’ (Perrault 1993: 58). Apparently, their submissiveness had been common for centuries. While the scholars of the monasteries deserved some praise for preserving knowledge against the ravages of time and invading armies, their belief (in God) constrained their spirit of inquiry and limited ‘the freedom needed for scrupulous investigation,’ transferring the respect that is due sacred things to things that are not, things such as architecture, which invite examination, criticism, and censure (Perrault 1993: 57–58).

The rejection of doctrine we see in seventeenth-century architecture was an outgrowth of a much more comprehensive attack on received wisdom carried out in the preceding decades. This polemic set the stage for the valorizations of research that has reached such heights in our time. Of the many sources that documented the history of this movement, perhaps the most incisive was Bernard Palissy, who was not only a great scientist, but also a designer of fountains, gardens, grottos, ceramics, and sculpture. Palissy's Discours admirable is basically one long invective against the professors of the Sorbonne. ‘I assure you, dear reader, that you will learn more about natural history from the facts contained in this book [which documents the results of research in his ‘workshop’] than you would learn in fifty years devoted to the study of the theories of the ancient philosophers’ (Palissy 1957: 26–27). Another important aspect of his research and workshop is that their orderly arrangements would allow any visitor to be his own instructor, tracing the steps Palissy had followed, in order to reach the same conclusions. Just as traditional wisdom was to be doubted method was to be trusted.

While it may seem odd to suggest that research could be undertaken in a studio or workshop, scientific advances in our time often occur outside university settings. In recent decades we have witnessed the steady increase of research centres, institutes, and foundations. Some have close ties with universities, others operate independently. Many graduates face a choice between work in these centres or the university, which often amounts to a choice between work in the basic sciences and applied fields. But even work in the basic sciences is no longer centred in academic institutions – still less in teaching programmes – because the institutional support for research is often non-academic. The massive and thorough-going transformation of society through industrialization has had its effect on universities as much as on any of the institutions of modern life. Anyone involved in research today knows that the question concerning funding determines the scope, setting, and personnel of study programmes. Advanced research is costly, prohibitively so if external support is not obtained. In many fields, close alliances between the academy and industry have formed, ostensibly for mutual benefit; support of inquiry allows privileged access for applications. What were once distinct spheres of activity now completely interpenetrate one another. Study programmes in medicine, for example, are commonly seen as extensions of the research industry. Corporations not only supply funding, they propose topics. But the alliance between the academy and business is not without its critics, for the fundamental purpose of science, the advancement of understanding, together with its characteristic style of thought, free inquiry – independent of applications – and critique, including self-critique, is often compromised by the push toward practical results. Can application-oriented testing undertaken in contemporary research centres be accurately described as scientific inquiry? A modern scientist is, I think, best prepared to answer this question.

From fact to probability

Four decades ago, one of the twentieth century's most distinguished physicists offered cautionary comments about the research industry. Describing the transition from free inquiry to applied research, Werner Heisenberg wrote: ‘In earlier days art and science were the cultural adornment of life, an adornment which could be afforded in good times but ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Design Innovation for the Built Environment
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to design innovation for the built environment – research by design and the renovation of practice
• 1 The project of design research
• 2 One step towards an ecology of design: fields of relations and bodies of knowledge
• 3 On the emergence of research by design and practice-based research approaches in architectural and urban design
• 4 Towards meeting the challenges of facilitating transdisciplinarity in design education, research and practice
• 5 Beyond Kenkyushitsu and atelier – towards a new professional education and practice
• 6 Reality Studio – a search for design tools to meet complexity
• 7 Research by design in the context of the OCEAN Design Research Association
• 8 Systems-oriented design for the built environment
• 9 Performance-oriented design as a framework for renovating architectural practice and innovating research by design
• 10 The Research Centre for Architecture and Tectonics – implementing research towards performance-oriented architecture
• 11 How can biology inform architects?
• 12 Relational practice
• 13 Studio Integrate – interview with a young practice focusing on research by design
• 14 Multiplying the ground
• 15 Building communication by design: mobile fiction and the city
• 16 Making material of the networked city
• Index