The Architect and the Academy

Essays on Research and Environment

Dean Hawkes

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000515602
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Arquitectura
• Categoria: Arquitectura general

This book presents an expansive overview of the development of architectural and environmental research, with authoritative essays spanning Dean Hawkes' impressive 50-year academic career.

The book considers the relationship between the technologies of the environment and wider historical and theoretical factors, with chapters on topics ranging from the origins of modern 'building science' in Renaissance England to technology and imagination in architecture. It includes numerous architectural examples from renowned architects such as Christopher Wren, Peter Zumthor, Alvar Aalto, Robert Venturi and Carlo Scarpa.

Aimed at students, scholars, and researchers in architecture and beyond, this illustrated volume collates important and wide-ranging essays tracing the definition, scope and methodologies of architectural and environmental studies, with a foreword by Susannah Hagan.

Essay 1¹
The centre and the peripherySome reflections on the nature and conduct of architectural research

DOI: 10.4324/9781003083023-2

Introduction

This essay, which derives from a talk given to the Martin Centre Research Society at the Department of Architecture at Cambridge in October 1994, examines the continuing relevance of the model of architectural research which was proposed at the Oxford Conference on architectural education in 1958. It suggests that the ‘Oxford model’, with its roots in the procedures of the sciences, in which ‘fundamental’ research precedes ‘development’ before leading into practical application, fails to account for the role of the designer in the evolution of the state of architecture. It also proposes that developments in architectural education, in particular the growth of the unit system of studio instruction, have added a further element to the productive and investigative potential of the schools of architecture and that this should be accounted for in any valid model of research.

When I joined the Cambridge School in January 1965, the head of the school, Leslie Martin, was in the process of developing a programme of research, and I worked on a project funded by the Building Research Station to investigate the relationship between daylighting standards and the form of mass housing layouts. This used scale models placed under the ‘trans-illuminated domical artificial sky’ that stood in the garden of the school at Scroope Terrace. This was the product of an earlier PhD project by David Croghan, who was the supervisor of the project. ² The project was directed from the Building Research Station by R.G. Hopkinson, one of the great building scientists. ³

1964 was just six years after the Oxford Conference on Education organised by the RIBA, which was to prove to be one of the most significant events in the development of architectural education in Britain, most particularly in the emphasis that was placed on the importance of research. By all accounts, Leslie Martin and Richard Llewelyn-Davies (who was to become head of the Bartlett School in 1960), played central roles in the debate. Martin was the author of the report of the conference, which was published in the RIBA Journal in June 1958. ⁴ There he wrote, ‘Theory is the body of principles that explains and interrelates all the facts of a subject’. His concern was to show that there wasn’t a ‘theory’ of architecture to deal with the issues that confronted both education and practice at that time. He went on to say, ‘Research is the tool by which theory is advanced. Without it teaching can have no direction and thought no cutting edge’ (My italics).

In an essay with the title, ‘Evolution of a Theory’, published in 1992, ⁵ I reviewed the achievements of the 25–30 years of research in the British schools of architecture. Following the Oxford conference, schools began to establish programmes of research and to attract external funding for this. At Cambridge, Martin encouraged such developments and promoted a number of individual projects, such as David Croghan’s daylighting work and the totally contrasted PhD project, submitted in the same year by Peter Eisenman on The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture. ⁶ In 1967, Martin made a great step forward when he established a centre for research that was based on three externally funded projects that, together, became the centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies. ⁷ A group of us got to work, more or less together, and things started to happen. At the same time, similar events occurred in other British schools and the foundations of a research culture were laid.

My review of this early research concluded that the outcome was largely positive and showed the extent and success of research as measured by a number of criteria. One such, that I regard as important in assessing the value of research in an ‘applied’ subject like architecture, is its value to practice. It is demonstrable that a good deal of the research that took place in schools of architecture in the 25 years or so from the mid-1960s was of benefit to practice. As an illustration, the conference held in 1992 to mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of LUBFS ⁸ was given the nicely ambiguous title, ‘Research into Practice’. At this, a wide range of papers illustrated some of the routes by which the research had, in some way or another, influenced practice, either by being directly applied to inform a particular building project or urban design proposal, or in some more general way, by the enumeration of specific knowledge.

At the Oxford Conference, Martin and his colleagues were particularly concerned to argue that research would benefit teaching and that, consequently, this better informed teaching would benefit practice. It is difficult to demonstrate the implication that teachers who research are better teachers than those who ‘just’ teach, but this seems to be a reasonable proposition. Those who are actively engaged in research, in whatever aspect of architectural studies, are teaching to some extent on the basis of their own work, and it is probable that this will offer a more substantial basis from which to teach than reliance on the published works of others.

Since the 1960s, research has become a major contributor to the income of schools of architecture and is also an indicator of their standing, both within their parent institutions and in the now commonplace procedures of research assessment, such as the REF – Research Excellence Framework – that are a fact of academic life.

The problem of theory

In this review of research, I failed, however, to discover that the research that had followed from the Oxford Conference had contributed much, if anything, to one of the conference’s – and Leslie Martin’s – principal aims: the development of ‘theory’, as declared in the key statement from the report, ‘Research is the tool by which theory is advanced’. By its nature and definition, the development of theory is unlikely to be a suitable subject for a research grant application.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary offers the following definition: ‘supposition explaining something, especially one based on principles independent of the phenomena to be explained’. P.B. Medawar, in The Art of the Soluble, ⁹ proposed a definition of the maturity of a discipline (a theory?) as occurring when, speaking metaphorically, ‘you no longer have to count the fall of every apple’. This seems to me very apt in this context. You have all-embracing principles by which you comprehend individual cases.

The dictionary goes on to offer another definition of theory as, ‘speculative thought’. This is very interesting in the present discussion. Leslie Martin wrote his ‘Architect’s Approach to Architecture’ essay, published in the RIBA Journal in April 1967, ¹⁰ just before the centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies was established. This was, implicitly, a manifesto for the work of the centre, in which he emphasised the significance of speculative thought by stressing, ‘It is speculation that makes rational thought live; and it is rational thought that gives speculative invention its basis and its roots’. Concise Oxford also goes on to give us ‘theory’ as the ‘exposition of the principles of a science’.

I have looked beyond the dictionary for other views on theory. One of my great heroes, Igor Stravinsky, when asked about the role of theory in music declared it to be, ‘hindsight’. ¹¹ Then he said, ‘it doesn’t exist’. Next, warming to the subject, he declared, ‘There are compositions from which it is deduced, or if this is not quite true, it has a by-product existence that is powerless to create or even to justify’. He then thought more and said, ‘Nevertheless, composition involves a deep intuition of theory’. This is a great man, thinking out loud, and helping to show that theory, in particular in musical composition, or I suggest by relevant analogy, in architecture, is a complex matter.

Turning to the sciences, I referred to Thomas Kuhn’s, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. ¹² Here we find the proposition that, in science, theory must be chosen for reasons that are ultimately personal and subjective. So, wherever we seek, we find that theory is a difficult matter.

At the Oxford Conference, Martin argued that, ‘without theory, research is no more than a study of techniques and parcels of this or that form of knowledge’. My analysis of the outcome of the first generation of post-Oxford research in the British schools of architecture was that this was precisely what had been achieved. There had been a large body of generally useful research across the full spectrum of the field, but this did not in sum or in part constitute a ‘theory’ of architecture.

An alternative model

What I want to do here is to look more widely at the nature of research in architecture, to re-evaluate the Oxford model, and to try to offer an alternative. Viewed at this distance, it appears that the model that emerged from Oxford derived from a particular and rather generalised idea of research in the scientific disciplines. The contributors to the conference were concerned to enhance the standing of the profession and saw university education as the means of achieving this – the creation of a graduate profession. At the time there were many routes into the profession, with so-called ‘unrecognised’ schools in a variety of institutions, art schools and technical colleges, preparing full and part-time students for the RIBA external examinations, alongside schools, often long-established, in the universities. It was against this background that universal, university-based education was attractive and that, following from this, schools of architecture would develop programmes of research on the model of other university disciplines.

In seeking to establish an approach to research in architecture, the Oxford model was, essentially, the model of the applied sciences. In this it is implied that ‘pure’ research leads to development, which then produces application. Research is where the fundamental thinking of a discipline takes place, which is then elaborated and transformed by a process of testing and development, which may or may not occur in the university, before emerging into the ‘real world’, where it informs some kind of production. In paraphrase, research is essential in order to develop useful ideas and products. In architecture, however, this model does not fit. Stravinsky’s critique of the relationship between theory and practice in music – ‘theory is hindsight’ – is, perhaps, useful here. By paraphrase, we can suggest, ‘There are buildings from which it is deduced’, then, ‘Nevertheless, design involves a deep intuition of theory’. Here the activity of design – practice – is brought to the centre of the discipline of architecture, which begs the question of the absence of design, its methods and its products, from the conversation of the Oxford conference and from its definition of the nature of architectural research.

It was with these thoughts in mind that I tentatively proposed an alternative model in which design, both in education and practice, is acknowledged as a mode of enquiry – as research – in architecture. ¹³ The most important idea offered was that architectural education should be at its heart a critique of practice. Teaching, in both the lecture room and the design studio, should be critical, and research on the broadest front, historical, theoretical and technical is, in some way, a critique of practice. But, as a teacher who combined research and practice, I proposed that the work of practitioner–teachers should have a place in the model through what I termed ‘critical practice’. By this I meant that this practice would be of necessity a critical activity in which projects were subject to agendas that extended beyond the circumstances of each individual project. Collectively, a sequence of projects might constitute a process of critical inquiry analogous to a research project. In that sense, practice would become research.

One of the most significant changes in the methods of architectural education since the Oxford conference is the adoption of the unit system of studio instruction, in some instances alongside the traditional, year-based approach – in others, in place of this. I have taught in both systems and see virtues in them both. In the context of the present discussion, the unit system offers the possibility for teachers and students together speculatively to explore themes that have research content. The teaching becomes research by leading to the production of a body of work that is more than a sequence of individual projects. In some instances, teachers collect the products of their studios over a period of time and re-present them in ways by which it cumulatively becomes research by design.

If we recognise the connection between conventional research, in topics that range across the humanities and applied sciences, speculative teaching – research by design and critical practice conducted by practitioner–teachers – we begin to see a model of research that acknowledges the true nature and full range of the discipline of architecture and that exhibits the characteristics that distinguish architecture from other academic disciplines.

In order to understand the questions and the possibilities of architectural research as it has evolved in the years since the Oxford conference, we must have a model in our minds that acknowledges what schools of arc...