Creative Practice Inquiry in Architecture 2021055255, 2021055256, 9781032004655, 9781032004693, 9781003174295

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Dedication
Copyright
Contents
Endorsements
Openings
Introduction: creative practice inquiry in architecture
Acknowledgements
Exposition and the staging of encounter: on assessing unconventional research outputs
Inquiries
Archival practices
Situational perhapsing
Draught/draft papers
Office practices
Storying Practiceopolis
Into the void: drawing-out the default space of the suspended ceiling
Amateur adaptions
Place-based practices
Being in-between: a multi-sited ethnography of retirement housing
Learning from Tokyo: reading architecture and urbanism through Deleuzian lenses
Between there and here: drawing an alternative future for Wenzhou
Building practices
Building, in the field
At home on site: expanding the field of architectural research
Studio practices
The Studio Apparatus
Discordant forms: seeking the transitional object in axonometric projection
Holding space in the post-digital: thinking through the Zoom studio
Machine practices
The architect’s cognitive prosthesis: a dialectical critique of Autodesk Revit
Neoliberal spectres: on creative practice and resisting instrumentality
Material practices
Biomaterial probes: creative practice engagement with living systems
Biodesign research in the Anthropocene
Liquid Architecture: design in a state of flux
Decentring humanism: working with nonhumans through the process of experiment
On reflection
Out of bounds: methods and outputs of the architect-researcher
Contributors
Figures
Index

Citation preview

Creative Practice Inquiry in Architecture Edited by Ashley Mason and Adam Sharr

For our colleagues and students, in gratitude Cover image: A range of designs for mobile furniture each designed with a specific hobby activity in mind. © James Longfield, 2013. See pp. 76–86 (p. 81). First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Ashley Mason and Adam Sharr; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Ashley Mason and Adam Sharr to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mason, Ashley, editor. | Sharr, Adam, editor. Title: Creative practice inquiry in architecture / edited by Ashley Mason and Adam Sharr. Description: Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021055255 (print) | LCCN 2021055256 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032004655 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032004693 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003174295 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Architecture--Research. | Research--Methodology. Classification: LCC NA2000 .C74 2022 (print) | LCC NA2000 (ebook) | DDC 720.72--dc23/eng/20220411 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021055255 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021055256 ISBN: 978-1-032-00465-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-00469-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-17429-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003174295 Typeset in Myriad Pro and Minion Pro

Publisher’s Note This book has been prepared from camera-ready copy provided by the editors.

Contents Openings Introduction: creative practice inquiry in architecture Ashley Mason and Adam Sharr

13

Acknowledgements

14

Exposition and the staging of encounter: on assessing unconventional research outputs Rolf Hughes

Inquiries

Contents

2

Archival practices

28

Situational perhapsing Ray Verrall

40

Draught/draft papers Ashley Mason

Ofce practices

52

Storying Practiceopolis Yasser Megahed

64

Into the void: drawing-out the default space of the suspended ceiling Kieran Connolly

76

Amateur adaptions James Longfeld

i

Place-based practices

88

Being in-between: a multi-sited ethnography of retirement housing Sam Clark

100

Learning from Tokyo: reading architecture and urbanism through Deleuzian lenses Nergis Kalli

112

Between there and here: drawing an alternative future for Wenzhou Xi Chen

Building practices

124

Building, in the feld Graham Farmer

136

At home on site: expanding the feld of architectural research Prue Chiles

Contents

Studio practices

148

The Studio Apparatus Matthew Ozga-Lawn

160

Discordant forms: seeking the transitional object in axonometric projection James Alexander Craig

172

Holding space in the post-digital: thinking through the Zoom studio Ed Wainwright

Machine practices

ii

184

The architect’s cognitive prosthesis: a dialectical critique of Autodesk Revit Alex Blanchard

194

Neoliberal spectres: on creative practice and resisting instrumentality Luis Hernan

Material practices

206

Biomaterial probes: creative practice engagement with living systems Carolina Ramirez-Figueroa

218

Biodesign research in the Anthropocene Assia Crawford

230

Liquid Architecture: design in a state of fux Pierangelo Marco Scravaglieri

240

Decentring humanism: working with nonhumans through the process of experiment Rachel Armstrong

254

Out of bounds: methods and outputs of the architect-researcher Katie Lloyd Thomas

266

Contributors

269

Figures

272

Index

Contents

On refection

iii

Architecture, as a discipline and a profession, is slowing awakening to the methodological opportunities availed by creative practice research. This collection ofers myriad situated examples of how creative practice research performs its important work, paying attention to material relations, place-based concerns as well as mobilising the powers of the imagination. — Hélène Frichot, Professor of Architecture and Philosophy, The University of Melbourne

Endorsements

For anyone interested in the creation of our built environment including practitioners, students and academics, Creative Practice Inquiry in Architecture provides vital new answers to the question of the nature of architectural research. It reveals research by design is a rapidly growing feld that operates from within the feld of architecture while integrating creative combinations with external innovations. This volume of essays brings together insightful overviews of the issues with case studies that refect a range of research sites and approaches based within a diversity of geographic locations. By taking us inside rigorous architectural research based in archive, studio, ofce, experimental lab and building site, that includes new technologies and materials, this book explains how we can move beyond traditional divisions between theory and practice. — Paul Emmons, Patrick and Nancy Lathrop Professor of Architecture, WashingtonAlexandria Architecture Center, Virginia Tech

This volume is a beautiful coming of age — a vibrant gathering of essays and projects that show with confdence and sensitivity what this feld, after at least two decades, is capable of. Traversing the institutional boundaries that all too often still divide the studio from the seminar room, Creative Practice Inquiry in Architecture makes vital reading for anyone embarking on a creative journey of their own, and for those keen to dive into this exciting form of architectural research in all its subtleties and depths. — Jane Rendell, Professor of Critical Spatial Practice, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

iv

Openings

Openings 1

Mason and Sharr

Introduction: creative practice inquiry in architecture Ashley Mason and Adam Sharr

2

of possibilities, indicating how creative approaches to architectural research can be adopted, adapted, and extended. Out of architecture In the post-war era, architects newly working in universities aimed to advance knowledge in our feld by adopting established academic methods, by borrowing from, for example, applied science, engineering, the humanities, and sociology. Doing so, they felt, brought scholarly credibility to architecture as a newcomer in the academy. This millennium, however, architectural researchers have worked instead to secure authority in universities for methods distinct to the feld—practices, for example, of drawing, installation, material prototyping, and creative speculation. This more recent feld of design research in architecture has gained increasing attention, particularly in North America, Europe, and Australasia. The chapters presented here seek to reconceptualise the idea of architectural design research specifcally in terms of creative practice inquiry. Taken together, they demonstrate how the feld of design research can be expanded through creative re-combination with traditional and novel modes of scholarly investigation

Architectural inquiries collected in this book probe matters that lie beyond the obvious expectations, the conventions, the default, of the discipline. Drawing, borrowing, adapting, dramatising, perhapsing, monstering, experimenting, cartooning—the tools and methods of each contributor vary but they all share a common outward gaze, engaging architectural ways of knowing with methods of other disciplines and practices.

Introduction

This book is about architectural knowledge: specifcally, how architects can deploy their distinctive skills, habits and values to advance professional insights; and how such insights can be extended to make wider contributions to culture, society, and scholarship. It recounts how architectural ways of working and knowing can be mobilised as tools of research. It seeks to introduce, illustrate, and advance fresh ideas about creative practice inquiry in our feld. This innovative volume will be of interest to: practitioners who want to use their distinctive professional abilities to contribute to architectural and scholarly knowledge; students keen to pursue architectural ways of thinking and writing; and academics and doctoral candidates keen to engage with the burgeoning scholarly feld of design research. Increasingly, design and practice-based research methods in universities are being translated from scholarly and doctoral level to masters and undergraduate level— where simultaneously in architectural ofces they contribute to the value of projects and the knowledge base of the profession—and this book thus aims to consolidate and catalyse architectural ways of knowing. It illustrates a range

3

from other disciplines, engaged through a broadly interpreted idea of practice. This book demonstrates, among others, creative archive practices, ofce practices, place-based practices, building practices, studio practices, machine practices, and material practices. It sets-out—under these headings—a series of diverse but connected approaches, illustrating the range and power of creative practice inquiry in architecture. Equally, each inquiry illustrated here emerges from a multitude of situations, for example: geographical (from Tokyo to Wenzhou to Byker); spatial (from archive to laboratory to studio); and invisible (from digital to hidden to imaginary realms).

Mason and Sharr

4

Openings Particularly in the UK—from where we write—the shape of architectural design research is conditioned, more than its protagonists might admit, by pragmatic extrinsic circumstances. Notably by the government’s instrumental measurement of university research output, linked to state funding: an octennial exercise most recently named REF (the Research Excellence Framework). The shape of UK architectural research culture also stems from the relative lack of separation between what are conventionally termed design, history, theory, and technology in UK architecture schools than is common elsewhere—indeed the majority of scholars work across these felds—resulting in relatively less disciplinary compartmentation. One aspect of REF is particularly relevant. That exercise assesses the quality of every publication from every university school, through peer review, according to

three categories: the work’s originality, its signifcance, and its rigour.1 For better or worse, this tripartite test has become an habitual way of conceptualising research in the UK. Sceptics of design research have rightly asked: ‘is design research?’The straightforward answer is that not all design is research and—indeed—maybe very little architectural design constitutes research. Architects tend to call the fnding-out they do in the studio ‘research’ when more correctly they’re exploring the appropriateness of materials, building products, building types, and contract forms. In relation to the three REF tests, this fnding-out commonly conducted by architects is sometimes rigorous, occasionally signifcant, but only rarely original, in the sense of constituting new knowledge. One might think of individual buildings and projects where new articulations of materials, technologies, even forms, can be understood as evidently original, but that remains comparatively unusual. Prominent in shaping design research culture in UK universities was a 1995 essay by Christopher Frayling, then Rector of the Royal College of Art, titled ‘Research in Art and Design’.2 Frayling ofered another tripartite categorisation, this time proposing: research by, for, and into design. Frayling characterised the latter—research into design—in terms of research already familiar in architectural history, theory, and criticism: cultural, philosophical, sociological, and ethnographic inquiries into design cultures and practices, and the values and habits of practice communities. Research for design, meanwhile, was that seeking knowledge preparatory

be characterised in terms of originality, signifcance and rigour, then so too can design. Design, and other less familiar modes of creative research, thus become straightforwardly equivalent to established research methods, as long as those three tests are met. It is perhaps a curious quirk that the bureaucratic exercise of REF in the UK has straightforwardly granted creative researchers legitimacy in universities, where the traditional gatekeepers of research quality in other academic cultures frequently remain cautious of novel work they perceive to be operating beyond conventional templates. It’s worth adding that, while attempts to articulate design in relation to established research methods discourses may be relatively new, the fundamental connection between the drawing of a line and the drawing forth of an idea is not novel. Indeed, the work of celebrated fgures from architectural history can be interpreted—retrospectively—in the terms of practice-based and practice-led design research (thinking perhaps of Sebastiano Serlio, Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Le Corbusier, or Zaha Hadid). One can also look to equivalent practices in cognate felds—like fne art, music, and creative writing—where academic practitioners have a similar stake in interpreting their historical canons retrospectively as academic research. Despite these long potential histories of design inquiry, the imperative to articulate creative work as research remains relatively recent, resulting from the postwar institution of our feld in universities and a parallel desire to claim the authority of design as a mode of research inquiry.

Introduction

to design and contributing to it, such as research into new materials and digital processes, and theoretical inquiry into the cultural preconditions of design practices. Research by design, however, remains the most novel of the three. It seeks new knowledge through the conduct of design. This third category is often characterised in terms of practice-led and practice-based inquiry. Practice-led inquiry is that where research emerges out of practice, towards new knowledge—usually through questions that have operational signifcance within that practice but are articulated separately from it. For example, questions led out of practice might prompt the writing of an academic paper, which could refer to creative outcomes, but which stands largely beyond those creative outcomes. Practice-based inquiry, however, is where the researcher privileges their studio, ofce, site, or workshop practices—usually through drawing and making—in faith that the reveries of creative immersion, rigorously pursued, will lead to original and signifcant insights. Here, the creative output might itself stand as research, with supplementary articulation in publications from the author(s) and others. Within a UK university context, any research by design—including practice-based and practice-led inquiry—must be evaluated by the same tests as any other research. This is where the bureauractic framework of REF is helpful to creative work in universities, because it places that work on a similar footing to other methods of research. If inquiry in felds as diverse as medicine, law, engineering, literary criticism, and social policy can all

5

Many of the chapters here can thus be appreciated as extensions of themes and questions posed previously, through shifting modes of investigation.

Mason and Sharr

6

Practices, projects, positions Research collected here engages creative habits and values distinctive to architecture with research methods known from other felds spanning—for example—critical theory, biotechnology, history, fne art, ethnography, engineering, and computing. These are not design research projects claiming legitimacy in terms of design alone, but creative practices emerging out of architecture that actively seek fruitful re-combination with other methods across the academic landscape. This, we claim, is the distinctive contribution of creative practice inquiry in architecture, distinguishing it from wider design research scholarship. Creative practice inquiry, as formulated here, hinges particularly on the researcher’s distinctive shaping of their own research practice. We defne practice not just in the commonplace sense of architectural ofce work: the set of established professional habits, conducted methodically towards a productive outcome, that architects acquire through shared values and long training. Our defnition taps wider notions of artistic practice too: iterative work, performed rigorously, through media chosen for their appropriateness to the inquiry at hand, conducted in a creative spirit, begun without a known end. Confdence is required to fruitfully initiate and sustain such a speculative research practice—and indeed to recognise how to conclude

it—in the faith required that it will lead to original and signifcant new knowledge. This conception of creative practice inquiry embraces recent theoretical concerns with so-called researcher positionality that emerge, for example, from feminist scholarship and gender studies. This work acknowledges that facts are not neutral, that aspirations towards objectivity inevitably remain out of reach in research, and that the researcher’s distinctive agency remains a vital and sustaining component of the work. Indeed, this approach emphasises the researcher’s embrace—and full, frank, rigorous articulation—of their subjectivity. It accepts the consequences of that subjectivity for the research not just as a necessary component of the work but as an animatory force in its originality. Inquiries Each architectural inquiry collected here probes matters that lie beyond the obvious expectations, the conventions, the default, of the discipline. Drawing, borrowing, adapting, dramatising, perhapsing, monstering, experimenting, cartooning—the tools and methods of each contributor vary but they all share a common outward gaze, engaging architectural ways of knowing with methods of other disciplines and practices. Meanwhile, the chapters simultaneously look inward as a memoir of researcher positionality, with authors asking provocative questions of their own place within their inquiries. This oscillating perspective, occupying a space simultaneously within and beyond, is a condition of creative practice inquiry that remains evident in its outcomes. The research collected here ofers insight not

Archival practices While methods of creative practice inquiry outlined here are important for researchers in both professional practice and academe, we choose to begin where academic research is perhaps stereotypically imagined: in the archive. We start there to emphasise our point about the creative re-combination of research methods involved in creative practice inquiry: that the habits and values of design inculcated in architects are relevant not just in their conventional milieux of ofce, studio, or site, but can also produce original insights by re-thinking how architects might practice, for example, as material scientists, theorists, ethnographers, or indeed historians in the archive. The two inquiries collected in this frst part of the book show that even archive-based history work—that seemingly most established

and codifed of academic pursuits—can be imagined afresh when approached as a creative practitioner. Ray Verrall writes about what happens when a researcher reaches the fullest extent of historical evidence available across archival, documentary, and human sources (pp. 28–39). What, then, is to be done about that which still remains unknown? He advances the notion of ‘perhapsing’: a creative practice that flls-in remaining gaps through rigorous, informed speculation. Verrall contends that empty spaces in the record can be understood creatively as a fertile ground for perhapsing stories around what is missing. Ashley Mason’s notion of paracontextual practice similarly plays with what lies beyond the empty page, or site. In ‘Draught/Draft papers’, Mason recovers an exhibition constructed to document another absent show, which itself referred back to a historical exhibition (pp. 40–50). She does so to demonstrate the potential of what she calls paracontextual practice— attending to matters of seemingly empty sites and their thresholds, interrogating claims to originality or fnality, accepting the swerves of coincidence, iteration, and inheritance. Her chapter refects upon and re-enacts the modes of her creative practice inquiry.

Introduction

only into incipient modes and tools of architectural research, but emerging ethical, practical, political, philosophical, and environmental positions intimately tied to the creative practices involved. After our introduction, Rolf Hughes examines specifcally how exposition became a key term for distinguishing design research from design practice (pp. 14–24). ‘Put simply’, Hughes says, exposition ‘is the strategy or set of strategies by which the researcher stages an encounter with artistic research such that the contribution becomes implicit or explicit’. The researcher’s obligation to demonstrate the originality, signifcance, and rigour of their work, he suggests, becomes constituted in the creation of felds of encounter together with that work.

Ofce practices The next part of our book moves from the archive to the architectural ofce. In ‘Storying Practiceopolis’, Yasser Megahed recounts creative auto-ethnographic methods that he employed in producing an architectural graphic novel (pp. 52–63).

7

Mason and Sharr

8

Megahed’s novel dramatised value conficts in the construction industry which he saw enacted among various protagonists involved in the various meetings that he experienced in his life in an architectural ofce. Cartooning methods, Megahed argues, bring to the fore contested values evident in the transactions of everyday architectural practice in a way which makes them available as an important subject of research. In ‘Into the void’, Kieran Connolly describes a series of observations that he made during a site survey of a listed building, distilled and interpreted through a resulting set of three measured drawings (pp. 64–75). Connolly homes-in on the element of the suspended ceiling which fgured large in his surveys, reading it as a ‘default’ element of architectural design and everyday practice. His drawing methods assert and frame what he describes as default dispositions of architectural practice. In ‘Amateur adaptions’, James Longfeld takes us to Byker (pp. 76–86). The 1970s redevelopment of that Newcastle-upon-Tyne suburb became renowned globally for its ‘pioneering’ model of community participation, led by the ofce of Anglo-Swedish architect Ralph Erskine. Longfeld’s practice, sited in Byker, establishes a radical mode of participation where the architectural ‘expert’ participates in the social ecologies and political structures of a place through their residence as an engaged citizen, becoming a situated expert with potential to catalyse non-expert tactics of appropriation, alteration, and adaption.

Place-based practices The subsequent group of chapters also develop lines of inquiry in relation to distinctive places, sharing auto-ethnographic approaches. Sam Clark investigates so-called ‘thirdage’ housing in the UK in the context of a rapidly ageing population. He interprets the stories of nine actors involved in the design, construction, management, and inhabitation of third-age housing through a multi-sited creative ethnography (pp. 88–99) investigating the role of diferent actors involved. Nergis Kalli engages with Tokyo through her creative practice in order to appreciate its ‘hidden order’. She refects on her journey as an opportunist architect, borrowing from the works of others to make sense of the city (pp. 100–111). Xi Chen’s practice works to envision an alternative future for Jiangxin Island in Wenzhou, China (pp. 112–122). He elaborates on participatory design activities, workshops, social studies, and political engagements that he employed to test diferent ideas of citizenship, and to exorcise what he refers to as the colonial ghost of the site. Building practices The focus of the next part of our book moves from place to site. Graham Farmer reviews seven structures designed and built as part of a long-term experiment in constructive creative research undertaken in collaboration with communities and organisations in rural Northumberland, UK, a programme called Testing Ground (pp. 124–135). A series of co-designed and co-constructed artefacts encourage

Studio practices Architects’ two key places of operation —site and studio—are compressed and combined creatively in the practice of Matthew Ozga-Lawn, focused on what he terms Studio Apparatus (pp. 148–159). A perspectival installation, constructed in his ofce at Newcastle University, brings into view the latent conditions of the architectural studio, allowing the connective threads between separate representational elements to be considered as active components in design processes. James Alexander Craig aims to further the subjective afordances of axonometry by comparing that drawing type to a psychoanalytical schema (pp. 160–171). He expands creatively on images produced by artist Rita Donagh by making a series of four axonometrics which reveal, through drawing perceptual information, his own relationship to the context of the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland. Ed Wainwright, meanwhile, considers that studio space in architecture school has historically been a space of embodied interactions. Between March

2020 and September 2021, because of the global COVID-19 pandemic, studio instead turned towards digitally mediated interactions. Wainwright refects on the consequences of this changed studio environment, arguing for a critical appraisal of both mediatised interactions in architectural education and the learning that emerges from this space (pp. 172–182). Machine practices Remaining with the digitally mediated world, Alex Blanchard creatively unpicks the Building Information Modelling (BIM) software package Autodesk Revit (pp. 184–193). Situating Revit as a design medium that forms a cognitive prosthesis for the architect, Blanchard’s research explores how the rigorous encoding of a building model conditions expression and generates compulsive modes of thinking where design possibilities are given by the software’s formal lexicon. In Luis Hernan’s chapter (pp. 194–204), digital technologies and the wireless protocols that they depend upon are identifed as key to enacting an ecology of computational devices woven into the fabric of everyday life. Hernan’s creative practice research aimed to bring these technologies under critical scrutiny and to understand their spatiality.

Introduction

a deeper understanding of existing landscapes and ecologies, as well as a re-imagining of regional and local space within a wider framework of sustainability. Prue Chiles considers the building site as a privileged place from which to view the practices of architectural research. She recounts interdisciplinary methods associated with the conversion of a historic cow barn in England’s rural Derbyshire (pp. 136–146). It is the collective endeavour of making on site, she argues, where the imaginative and the inventive happen.

Material practices The fnal group of chapters examines material practices: creative investigations into the imagining, prototyping, and testing of novel architectural materials. They examine possibilities for new biological materials in response to the climate crisis facing our world, engaging with

9

Mason and Sharr

10

biodesign, biotechnologies, and synthetic biology through experimental practices. Beyond prototype and experiment, all four chapters stress that biological material practices require a rethinking of relations between human designers and living materials, which themselves become nonhuman designers. Such work requires a recognition of the agency of the nonhuman in design, and the urgent need—in the face of human-made climate change— to nurture all living things. This work stresses the urgency to move beyond the notion of living materials as only a standing reserve for humans to exploit and consume, towards a reinvigorated culture of care. These inquiries thus provide not just creative speculations through hands-on material experimentation and prototyping, but also a fundamental refection on the future idea of material in architecture. Carolina Ramirez-Figueroa opens with her research practice making biomaterial probes, where design situations are engaged to explore the possibilities of biological systems (pp. 206–217). Set against contemporary discourses in biotechnologies advocating for standardisation and a reduction of complexity, Ramirez-Figueroa’s research conceptualises living matter as possessing a form of vibrant agency creating assemblages with human designers. Assia Crawford similarly examines the potential for living materials as co-creators and proposes that, through developing living matter, we establish collaborative environments between species where we orchestrate behaviour by providing encouragement in the form of conditions for those microorganisms to live (pp.

218–229). Her practice tests and refects upon creative opportunities for establishing such collaborations. For Pierangelo Marco Scravaglieri, the pressing global challenges that our species faces—climate change; environmental injustice—increasingly point too to the need for a more symbiotic and resilient approach to natural systems, which could beneft from the integration of regenerating material fows into our inhabitable spaces (pp. 230–239). He shows how this could be imagined through liquid paradigms. Taking a new materialist perspective, Rachel Armstrong examines modes of mutual cooperation that bring human and nonhuman realms into mutual proximity, explored through a series of case studies ranging from ‘protocells’, to microbes and other ‘monstered’ (uncategorisable) bodies (pp. 240–252). Creative and experimental practices extend more-than-human relations, she argues, resulting in a kind of proto-handbook for experiment with life in the third millennium. On refection Katie Lloyd Thomas’ closing chapter refects on her experiences of examining doctoral research in architecture: both that which has been categorised as creative practice, and that understood as work operating according to what might sometimes be called traditional methods (pp. 254–265). Most architect-researchers employ tools and methods that they have acquired through professional training and, for Lloyd Thomas, identifying these distinctive architectural methods helps to consolidate architectural research in its

Creative practice literatures In the UK, recent books—like architectural theorists and historians Anne Dye and Flora Samuel’s Demystifying Architectural Research: Adding Value to Your Practice, and Samuel’s Why Architects Matter: Evidencing and Communicating the Value of Architects,3 have highlighted the burgeoning engagement of practicing architects with research. There is an increasing realisation that architects’ value comes from professional knowledge that they can bring to bear. Other professions—such as medicine, law, and engineering—have more normalised research practices and literatures to consolidate and extend disciplinary knowledge. Against this background, there seems a growing acknowledgement that architects need to signifcantly reinforce architectural research culture, not least to prosper in the construction industry of the present and future. In this context, our book explores and highlights distinctively architectural ways of thinking and knowing. As we have already suggested, creative practice inquiry draws on a growing body of scholarship accounting for design research in architecture. As Yasser Megahed refected in 2018:

Key texts in architectural design research are increasingly leaving behind the question ‘is design considered research or not?’ to search instead for how to secure the status of design as a rigorous mode of academic inquiry. There is increasing confdence in the architectural feld about the potential and power of design as a research method. Yet the notion of design research in architecture remains broad, with a diversity of approaches echoed in a diversity of distinct but overlapping terminologies.4 The collection Mapping Design Research: Positions and Perspectives,5 edited by design theorists Simon Grand and Wolfgang Jonas, scoped-out the territories of design research—and its emerging vocabularies—in the mid-2010s. Murray Fraser’s Design Research in Architecture: An Overview,6 and parts of architectural historian and theorist Raymond Lucas’s Research Methods for Architecture,7 published almost simultaneously, similarly delineate the territory and the language at work. Jane Rendell’s account of what she terms critical spatial practice is also highly relevant to what follows here: thinking about how charged spaces can become a locus of exploration; imagining space in the broadest sense as an expanded feld embracing and collapsing together not just the spaces of architecture, cities, and landscapes, but the space of the page, the event, the artwork, and the performance.8 Her recent work towards ethical spatial practice, too, is pertinent to the research within this volume.9 Furthermore, as illustrated by various inquiries collected here, doctoral work in architecture often provides a vital locus for the extension

Introduction

own right. Her chapter ofers a provocation: that the alternative forms of output opened up by creative practice formats— including installations, exhibitions, and performances—might be at their most powerful when they are mobilised to destabilise and critique research conventions, and that they therefore should be applicable to all research in and through architecture.

11

Mason and Sharr

12

of creativity in research. Here, Federica Gof’s edited volume InterVIEWS: Insights and Introspection on Doctoral Research in Architecture,10 provides a contemporary survey of the origins and preoccupations of various high-profle contemporary PhD programmes. By delineating the idea of creative practice inquiry in architecture, we ofer this book as a lively and resourceful contribution to further the literature on design research. Simultaneously recognising the potential of architecture’s values and habits for contributing to the intellectual commonwealth—and appreciating the importance of disciplinary knowledge— creative practice inquiry remains outwardly engaged, embracing, mixing, and (re-)interpreting established and novel methods from across the scholarly landscape. We hope that the inquries collected here will inspire creative researchers—and research—that can make original, signifcant, and rigorous contributions to architectural and scholarly knowledge; to the profession, and to culture and society at-large.

1. REF 2021, Guidance on submissions (Bristol: REF 2019), p. 7, [accessed 9 August 2021]. 2. Christopher Frayling, ‘Research in Art and Design’, in Royal College of Art Research Papers (London: RCA, 1994). 3. Anne Dye and Flora Samuel, Deymstifying Architectural Research: Adding Value to Your Practice (London: RIBA Publishing, 2015); Flora Samuel, Why Architects Matter: Evidencing and Communicating the Value of Architects (London: Routledge, 2018). 4. Yasser Megahed, ‘On research by design’, arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, 21.4 (2017), 338–43 (p. 338), . 5. Simon Grand and Wolfgang Jonas, Mapping Design Research: Positions and Perspectives (Berlin: Gruyter, 2012). 6. Murray Fraser, Design Research in Architecture: An Overview (London: Routledge, 2013). 7. Raymond Lucas, Research Methods for Architecture (London: Laurence King, 2016). 8. Jane Rendell, Art & Architecture: A Place Between (London: IB Tauris, 2006), pp. 12–30. 9. Jane Rendell, ‘Hotspots and Touchstones: From Critical to Ethical Spatial Practice’, Architecture and Culture, 8.3/4: Architecture and Collective Life (2020), 407–19. 10. Federica Gof (ed.), InterVIEWS: Insights and Introspection on Doctoral Research in Architecture (London: Routledge, 2021).

The idea of creative practice inquiry in architecture that we set-out in this book was produced collaboratively. It emerged from a decade’s work by a group of academic and student colleagues who initiated together a PhD by Creative Practice at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University, UK. We inherited the term ‘creative practice’ for what we then envisaged as our new design-based PhD programme from the expedience of re-using existing institutional academic regulations that already bore that name, previously devised by scholars from music and creative writing. We came to realise quickly, though, how powerful the formulation could be for our feld. We saw the scope it yielded to appreciate design research broadly, encouraging creative interplay between the habits and values of architectual culture and the methods of other disciplines. It encouraged us too to reinterpret established methods in our feld more creatively. What might it mean to concieve historical research, material experimentation, theoretical inquiry, ethnographic work, or professional studies themselves as creative practices? The consequences of thus conceiving architectural research in terms of creative practice has extended outwards from our PhD programme: re-thinking graduate and undergraduate dissertations to make greater space for architectural ways of knowing; encouraging academic

colleagues to engage more creatively with traditional research methods; and gathering momentum beyond our school via publications, buildings, symposia, projects and artefacts, through our rapidly growing doctoral cohort who have now taken-up positions elsewhere in professional practice and academe. We’re indebted to the authors collected here who—collectively and individually—have articulated together the idea of creative practice inquiry curated in this book, where the feld of design research is expanded through creative re-combinations with modes of scholarly investigation from other disciplines, engaged through a broadly interpreted idea of practice. And we’d like to thank further colleagues who’ve made equally signifcant contributions: Sam Austin, Andrew Ballantyne, Martin Beattie, Kati Blom, Ben Bridgens, Tom Brigden, Neil Burford, Emma Cheatle, Nathaniel Coleman, Martyn Dade-Robertson, Andrew Donaldson, Mark Dorrian, Josep-Maria Garcia-Fuentes, Polly Gould, Simon Hacker, Neveen Hamza, Claire Harper, Julia Heslop, Christos Kakalis, Peter Kellett, Zeynep Kezer, Marian Kyte, Cara Lund, Daniel Mallo, Matthew Margetts, Jane Midgley, Ruth Morrow, Ivan Marquez Munoz, Juliet Odgers, Rosie Parnell, Stephen Parnell, Peter Sharpe, Richard Talbot, Armelle Tardiveau, Geof Vigar, and Jianfei Zhu. Critical friends have played their part, including Paul Emmons, Katja Grillner, Jonathan Hill, Julieanna Preston, Jane Rendell, and Jeremy Till. We’re grateful to Routledge’s reviewers for their insightful comments, and to Fran Ford and Trudy Varcianna for their encouragement and support.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

13

Hughes

Exposition and the staging of encounter: on assessing unconventional research outputs Rolf Hughes

14

the praxis of making and playing. In artistic research practice, art lets us know what it is and what perspective it ofers.2

Note on terminology In this chapter, I address design-led research as well as artistic research (and its fndings can also apply to interdisciplinary research, although that is not a core focus here). These research paradigms are positioned in contrast to The difuse ontological status of [Hans-Jörg] those that are regularly characterised Rheinberger’s epistemic things (which as scientifc research (which I take to he called ‘things’ for good reason), their unfnished nature, is fundamental: epistemic include the humanities, even though it is the case that humanities researchers things derive their very knowledge-genincreasingly incorporate creative practices erating power from the fact that they are into their research output). In order to indistinct, not yet fully crystallized. And mark a distinction to scientifc research, I whereas the one time these things are, in have adopted the collective term artistic a methodological sense, vehicles through research here throughout; the reader which we can know, the next time they are, should understand that this includes the in an ontological sense, things we want areas of creative practice inquiry and to know; and then another time they are, design-led research, understood in the in an epistemological sense, things that wider scope of other creative practices. embody knowledge. The phrase ‘research This is not to equate the practices of in and through the arts’ captures this design and architecture with those of art intertwinement of perspectives: it is about the knowledge, understandings, experiences, but rather to distinguish key diferences between two broad research paradigms. and perspectives that are embodied in art Just as scientifc research spans a myriad objects and practices, and which manifest of disciplines, methods, and practices, so themselves through the praxis of the arts,

Exposition has become a key term for distinguishing artistic research from artistic practice. Put simply, it is the strategy or set of strategies by which the researcher stages an encounter with artistic research such that the contribution becomes implicit or explicit. But an exposition is not an illustration of an idea or theory. It is rather the creation of felds of encounter.

Exposition and the staging of encounter

Creative practice inquiry incorporates aspects and features that are not—or not solely—text based, such as artefacts, movements and sounds. Researchers need a variety of presentation platforms that combine these aspects and features in relevant forms and thus deviate from, or expand, the standard format of journal articles, research repositories and archives.1

15

too does artistic research, including the design disciplines, of which architecture is the main focus of this chapter.

Hughes

16

propose values and attitudes—through making, handling, and transforming things—that underpin new knowledge. It is therefore unsurprising that many Interpreting and evaluating artistic and design-led researchers are Since the integration of architecture keen to stress the notion that established programmes in universities, the research models of assessment from the sciences domains of design-led research and artisand humanities are not applicable to their tic research have signifcantly expanded. research. The two domains characteristically use What, then, is applicable as a measure practice-led methods to arrive at insights of assessment? How do we establish that could not be discovered through the basis of judgement? Are such values other means and produce research output transferable or peer-specifc? How can in the form of artistic and design research the established conventions of peer outputs (henceforth referred to as ADROs). review serve the double demands (artistic These might take the form of non-textual or design quality, and research quality) formats such as models, artefacts, installa- of such research? Furthermore, how tions, exhibitions, performances, flms, or might solutions found in response to the a combination. Written publications may ‘evaluation problem’ of unconventional take the form of ‘conventional’ outputs research outputs in art and design help (such as academic, scholarly, refective support the evaluation of interdisciplinary essays), creative genres (fction, poetry, and transdisciplinary research? drama, dialogue), or a hybrid. As ADROs Artistic and design-led research (i.e. can be extra-textual—involving architecresearch primarily driven by practice in tural, artefactual, material, or performative the arts and design disciplines) represent outcomes—they pose a challenge to multifaceted research paradigms with a existing conventions of registration range of diferent practices, methods, and and valorisation. concepts. Research developed through Contemporary research frameworks the individual researcher’s practice may typically position all disciplines, including be expressed not exclusively in text but artistic research, in relation to a modern also in formats—or via artefacts and scientifc paradigm. The fuzzy concept of performances—that may be considered ‘refection’ that is often demanded from ‘unconventional’. These may include an artistic researcher is one expression of performative practices, immersive a scientifc (humanities-based) obsession experiences involving sound, image, or with clarity, explanation, and understandform, as well as experimental practices ing. Privileging rational, objective, and where material, intangible, sensory, or reproducible forms of knowledge, such atmospheric elements are in focus. perspectives deeply misunderstand and Research specifc to a certain even obstruct knowledge practices that art or design practice or a particular are embodied, deploy the senses, and feld may aim to extend the practice’s

means of presenting the research to critical and public audiences. As a result, the conditions for interpreting and evaluating the research exposition becomes part of the challenge of assessment, as does the expression of the research in multifaceted research objects and/or performances, demanding from evaluators sophisticated ‘literacies’ across a range of practices, materials, and sites. Multiple epistemic claims Artistic and design-led research opens the possibility of a productive interplay between difering ways of thinking, interacting, experiencing, and thereby of creating new modes of discourse and argumentation, as well as research methods and artefacts. This suggests that it engages the play of multiple ‘rationalities’ or sensibilities, even reserving the option of provoking cognitive dissonance in its audience as an appropriate framing of unresolved questions.3 Henk Borgdorf concludes his paper ‘Artistic Research within the Fields of Science’ by celebrating the feld’s protean and transformative qualities:

What is artistic research all about? It is about cutting-edge developments in the discipline that we may broadly refer to as ‘art’. It is about the development of talent and expertise in that area. It is about articulating knowledge and understandings as embodied in artworks and creative processes. It is about searching, exploring, and mobilising—sometimes drifting, sometimes driven—in the artistic domain. It is about creating new images, narratives, sound worlds, experiences. It is about broadening and shifting our perspectives, our horizons. It is about constituting and accessing uncharted territories. It is about organised curiosity, about refexivity and engagement. It is about connecting knowledge, morality, beauty, and everyday life in making and playing, creating, and performing. It is about ‘disposing the spirit to Ideas’ through artistic practices and products. This is what we mean when we use the term ‘artistic research.4 Borgdorf uses the term ‘unfnished thinking’ to characterise the sort of ‘embodied’ experiences and insights that artistic research ofers, the material outcomes of which, he claims, are ‘non-conceptual and non-discursive’, and the persuasive quality of which is located in ‘the performative power through which they broaden our aesthetic experience’. Again, the value of safeguarding a provisional indeterminacy is emphasised, and the feld is accordingly characterised as ‘the articulation of the unrefective, non-conceptual content enclosed in aesthetic experiences, enacted in creative practices and embodied in artistic products’.5 Such a formulation vividly foregrounds the

Exposition and the staging of encounter

methodologies or modes of expression, to develop new types of co-operation or collaborative structures, to explore new technological possibilities or diferent ways of interacting with the intended audience for the research. Research outputs may combine real-time live elements with those that are mediated through diferent technologies. Staged or mediated forms may be the most appropriate

17

problem of the assessment and evaluation of artistic research. Freed from the restrictive rigours of mono-disciplinary logics, artistic and design-led research seems to promise adjacent force felds of shape-shifting potentialities.

Hughes

18

Communicating knowledge and experience These domains of research raise numerous questions about our assumed relationship to knowledge. What is ‘knowing’ for artists and designers? How do we know what we know? Can we communicate this knowledge to a third party, one outside our community of practitioners? And, if so, what might be the most apt form, performance, curated artefact, or ‘structure of attention’ for doing so? The problem of exposition becomes particularly acute in the performing arts, where the experiential basis of artistic process and encounter is central. Michael Biggs has written of artistic research (‘practice-led’ research or ‘creative practice’ research as it is more commonly referred to in the UK today) as comprising an experiential component that is communicable to others. But the core of the problem, Biggs claims, is indeed the communication of experiential content. To attempt such communication is to take decisions about the meaning of an experience, and how that might be related to our shared context. Biggs argues that the question of whether one can refect upon experience and the extent to which either refection (i.e. cognition) or expression (i.e. linguistic or non-linguistic representation) ‘corrupts’ the experiential content remains a profound ontological and epistemological

question. ‘We can translate the problem of experiential content into one of representation’, Biggs writes: [W]e can identify a feature that is sufciently important as to underlie the most intractable problem of research in this area. The problem is that the experiential feelings that represent experiential content are private to the experiencing individual. Experiences must be expressed in the frst person; ‘I feel [...]’. While they remain private experiences they cannot reasonably be regarded as research because they do not meet the criterion that research should be disseminated [...] But the problems of identifying and communicating frst person experiences to second and third persons is notoriously difcult. 6 Subjectivity is viewed with suspicion in many research cultures, just as objectivity is dismissed as an ideological construct by feminist and post-colonial scholars, among others. Can there be an exchange of the sort of knowledge that arises from private experience, expressed perhaps in a private language, that nonetheless satisfes research’s conventional demand for testing, generalisability, and repeatability? Shifting from the individual to the collective, interdisciplinary research brings its own challenges to what we might call ‘epistemic partiality’. Interdisciplinary research So far, we have seen research methods developed from specifc lines of inquiry that projects are designed to address and that build on the exploration taking its starting point in artistic or design practice;

better linking scientifc and technological advances with marginalised interests and social innovations.7 Experimentation and crossing boundaries are central to artistic and design-led research. By exploring staged epistemic encounters, while rooted in a specialised artistic or design area of expertise, the research also contributes to increased understanding of the complexity of human interaction. In summary, artistic and design-led research contributes to the development of hermeneutic practices by strengthening and extending our capacity to identify value and articulate quality across a range of discursive genres, artefacts, material, and performative gestures. It also helps to develop those practices’ interactions with other areas of research and to strengthen their role as a critical voice in the public debate.

critical perspectives, interdisciplinary comparisons, collaborations, or transdisciplinary dialogue. Science and technology policy researcher Andy Stirling writes that ‘true interdisciplinary research escapes the shackles of particular theoretical prejudices, privileged methods or favourite solutions.’ This is usually achieved, he claims, not through large programmes, but ‘in more intimate pluralities embodied within small teams, or even individuals.’ Published outcomes for such research may span several diferent felds, and these may change over time as the project evolves. The result, according to Stirling, is ‘greater openness and transparency about the diversity of ways to understand and address particular problems’:

A description problem Each artistic and design-led research project, then, is obliged to design appropriate forms to express, stage, exhibit, unfold its fndings resonantly.8 What are the

Such plural forms of interdisciplinary research depend on particular conditions of inquiry. Through enabling (rather than suppressing) scepticism and criticism, policies become more robust, responsible and accountable. Apparently messy, bottom-up interdisciplinarity can yield unexpected insights and possibilities, transcending neatly organised multidisciplinarity. It facilitates more radical interactions between diferent styles of knowledge, fostering potentially transformative solutions, and

implications for an academic culture built on the standardisation of formats and the duplication and wide dissemination of results? For some, the return of writing, now operating under an expanded, generically-hybrid ‘creative and critical’ brief, conscious of its own logocentric biases—and thus fully capable of snuggling up to the very forces that were supposed to resist its overbearing charms—might undermine the special characteristics of artistic and design-led research as extra-linguistic

Exposition and the staging of encounter

for example in advanced experiments in form, materials, relations, or in the shaping of experimental artistic and design processes and methods. Such projects typically create refection and documentation methodologies within—and in relation to—the research practice and thus develop diferent ways of developing the project’s thinking further. These methodologies may further be based on diferent

19

Hughes

modes of research. What happens to philosopher Michael Polanyi’s notion of ‘tacit knowledge’—the idea that ‘we can know more than we can tell’—if we can write crisp, peer-reviewed essays defning it and extolling its central importance?9 What happens to the sensory encounter with the material qualities of an artefact if this aura-rich experience may be satisfactorily invoked via an ekphrastic catalogue essay or research article? Can one describe in words the tactile qualities of a craft object such that it enters our thinking and emotions through our fngertips? Artistic and design-led research acknowledge the full range of conceptual and sensory information that can be brought to bear in an attempt to make sense of something. But this brings the risk that, under cover of the supposed ‘inefability’ of the artist’s or designer’s material practice, the onus of interpretation is shifted to the work’s intended audience, reader—or examiner. How ‘translatable’ is aesthetic pleasure or sensory experience generally?10 While it is important, of course, to acknowledge that there is in artistic research a widespread description problem, it may be equally important to note that questions of research relevance, impact, and evaluation are not infrequently deferred in favour of investigations into ‘the creative process’, or mappings of form, infuences, or other varieties of introspective inquiry subsumed under the sometimes solipsistic concept of ‘refective practice’.11 Refective practice in art and design not infrequently assumes an individual agent toiling away to ‘author’ creative work—a modern self, in short, and with it a theory of cultural production.

20

Since this conceptualisation of authorship underpins much of the debate around exposition, it is worth pausing to consider what it means to assign a certain body of work to a specifc individual. How do categories of author and work inform each other when documenting artistic research that is typically a complex weave of collaborations? What interdisciplinary perspectives might we bring to investigate the cultural, technological, and economic aspects of cultural production—not least the institutions of ownership and reward that historically legitimise and reinforce the bond between author and intellectual property? Exposition When I frst started thinking about what we are now calling exposition, I found inspiration in philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler’s essay ‘Giving an Account of Oneself’12 in which she discusses the ethics of giving an account of oneself or of an other. It struck me that similar challenges—formal as well as ethical—come into play when attempting to give an account of the research significance of an art artefact, performance, or practice. So, in lectures and publications I started discussing the challenges of giving an account in artistic research. Before long, however, I realised that this was a very logocentric bias—it favoured writers like myself who could play with generic conventions when giving an account but disadvantaged those for whom verbal dexterity was not an integral part of their practice. So, in lectures and publications I replaced the idea of giving an account with the notion of staging an encounter

the description of the insights and the results of the research can also be given in a format, object, or performance other than written form. The encounter with the artistic artefact or performance becomes a central feature in the critical review of the aesthetic, epistemological, ethical, political, or social dimensions contained in or demonstrated by the work. This requires research to be critically reviewed by peers

to knowledge? Further questions then started tumbling out:

with the skills and competence to process the claims and arguments contained in the research results, often in a combination of diferent exposition formats. The academic essay can be seen as the pinnacle of a process of refning what one could call a technology of explanation, using language and generic conventions such as primary and secondary sources, footnotes, and bibliography. The academic essay seeks to map, position, argue, explain, and justify. Its ideal response would be one of understanding. Whether that leads to contestation or admiration on the part of the reader is a secondary concern. Should we continue to assume that a single, coherent ‘authoritative’ text is better suited to exploring the play of conceptual possibilities than a complex, unconventional series of provisional, tentative remarks or discrete facts presented in the form of a dialogue or narrative? Can we deploy narrative loose ends with critical sophistication, subtlety, or precision? Such questions, posing profound challenges to the conventions of academic research, are central not only to artistic research, but to intersectional gender, race, post-colonial, and queer studies, as well as ethnography, anthropology, and sociology. Ground-breaking examples of

What is the story of the work? What story are you telling? Who (or what) is telling the story? To whom (who is implicitly or explicitly excluded)? At what distance? With what motivations? Where do you begin? In media res? Or chronologically (‘I did this, then I did that…’)? What order do you follow? Is it a story or a poem/temporal or spatial logic/narrative or immersive experience? How do you create the conditions of trust for its reception? Exposition has become a key term for distinguishing artistic research from artistic practice. Put simply, it is the strategy or set of strategies by which the researcher stages an encounter with the artistic research such that the contribution becomes implicit or explicit. Researchers present their concepts, processes, artefacts, and performances for peers with the help of exposition where diferent artistic intentions and focuses can be clearly set out. Each research project must therefore present its results in a way that is both rigorous and consistent. This means that

Exposition and the staging of encounter

with the artistic research work, such that the research contribution is made explicit, or remains implicit. That staging could take many forms. What is the diference, I started wondering, between description (‘I am interested in…’, ‘This is a…’, ‘And then I worked on this…’) and exposition? Staging an encounter? If so, towards what end? Making a claim? A contribution

21

Hughes

22

academic experimental writing are found among feminist scholars and philosophers such as Hélène Cixous, Donna Haraway, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler. Related experiments in architectural writing have been pursued by Jennifer Bloomer, Diana Agrest, Jane Rendell, and others. But an exposition is not an illustration of an idea or theory. It is rather the creation of felds of encounter, and these are not typically translatable into a stable, unambiguous ‘message’. Sensory experience, embodied knowledge, familiarity with existing methods and generic conventions, and therefore recognition of the innovative quality of the practice unfolding before us, as well as, importantly, unknowing—by which I mean a sensitive receptivity to the complexity of aesthetic experience without hiding behind art historical games such as ‘spot the infuence’—all these, and more, come into play. Perhaps we are today confronting a form of non-human exposition (since you fail to appreciate the consequences of your destruction of our shared living systems, let the consequences of the COVID19 pandemic aid your understanding), our reception to which has been played out on the news each night. If I talk from my own practice, primarily as a writer, and specifcally a prose poet, I have found this refected in an interest in chasing human exceptionalism from centre stage by occupying multiple agencies and therefore perspectives, each given equal weight, and shifting sometimes within the same sentence. More broadly, I have found myself at home in ecologies of practices, which requires frst that one establish a condition of trust between individuals

with strong practices, honed over many years, and an openness to experimentation. Such experimentation may draw on virtuosity, but virtuosity itself is not the focus, the focus is rather: what is being learned? And what is the quality or value of what is being learned (and for whom)? One can distinguish a politics of discovery in this respect from the less interesting politics of legitimisation and validation. But they demand diferent types of ‘literacy’ (or value creation) than those honed in siloed, mono-disciplinary contexts. By developing diferent formats in which peer review can be carried out, research within the felds of artistic and design-led research also addresses the challenges that arise when research is formulated and presented in forms that communicate through an artistically performed experience. Research in the area thereby also contributes to pushing the boundaries that existing forms of research publication and dissemination set for the ambitions of such research. The international, peer-reviewed Research Catalogue, created and managed by the Society for Artistic Research, is a key publication and dissemination resource in this respect, and one which can be used for archiving and accessing completed artistic and design-led doctoral dissertations.13 Review and evaluation Because we do not know how to measure knowledge while it is being generated and when its practical use cannot be predicted, the best we can do is ask experts in the feld—a process called expert review [or peer review]—to evaluate research regularly while it is in progress. These experts

The Swedish Research Council, mirroring the UK's REF (Research Excellence Framework), has proposed that the assessment of the quality of research production be based on criteria which are to be assessed by an expert panel from an international research perspective: - novelty and originality - signifcance to the feld of research in general - scientifc reliability and rigour (or the equivalent for the artistic research area).15 Such criteria are somewhat generic and therefore relatively uncontroversial. Artistic research is no stranger to originality, although one should make a distinction between artistic and academic originality (as Borgdorf counsels).16 The criteria from the Swedish Research Council might be applied as follows: ‘Signifcance to the feld of research in general’ can also be phrased as ‘contribution to knowledge and understanding’.17 Such contributions can be assessed both by peers within the given community of practice, and those without. The closest artistic equivalent to ‘scientifc reliability and rigour’ may be the notion of (artistic/design) ‘rigour and relevance’, which again can be assessed by peer groups.

Closing thoughts In scientifc research, the skill of the practitioner is assumed to be independent from the method. This implies that a particular approach will always create the same outcome whether the practitioner is naïve or experienced. In artistic and design-led research, the accumulation of experience means that an advanced practitioner is likely to produce superior results to an apprentice. While the objectivity of the scientifc method uncouples the personality of the scientist from the knowledge s/he creates, the wisdom of both the artist and designer is embodied. Practical experience is the basis for navigating and synthesising the complexities of such knowledge.18 If we seek to stage encounters with experiential complexity and ethical preferences, we will sometimes need unconventional forms of research exposition to do so. When such novel artefacts, performances, and experiences become more familiar, our focus will likely shift from an anxiety about the metrics of measurement to the quality of the encounter, confgured through the nuanced conversations by which we understand and value each other’s experience, and the signifcance of its contribution to our developing knowledge.

Exposition and the staging of encounter

[…] can determine whether the knowledge being generated is of high quality, whether it is directed to subjects of potential importance to the mission of the sponsoring agency, and whether it is at the forefront of existing knowledge—and therefore likely to advance the understanding of the feld.14

23

Hughes

24

1. Society for Artistic Research et al., ‘The Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research’, Society for Artistic Research, October 2020 [accessed 24 June 2021]. 2. Henk Borgdorf, The Confict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), p. 206. 3. Alan Hedges, Sally FordHutchinson, and Mary Stewart-Hunter, ‘How people deal with conficting ideas’, in Testing to Destruction: A Critical Look at the Uses of Research in Advertising (London: Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, 1974; rev. ed. 1997), pp. 66–70 (p. 66). 4. Henk Borgdorf, ‘Artistic Research within the Fields of Science’, Sensuous Knowledge, 6 (Bergen: Bergen National Academy of the Arts, 2009), p. 21 [accessed 24 June 2021]. 5. Henk Borgdorf, ‘The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research’, in The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, ed. by Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 44–63 (p. 47). 6. Michael Biggs, ‘Learning from Experience: approaches to the experiential component of practice-based research’, in Forskning, Refektion, Utveckling, ed. by Henrik

Karlsson (Stockholm: Vetenskapsrådet, 2004), pp. 6–21 (p. 10). 7. Andy Stirling, ‘Disciplinary dilemma: working across research silos is harder than it looks’, The Guardian, 11 June 2014 [accessed 15 June 2020]. 8. Michael Schwab, ‘The Research Catalogue: A Model for Dissertations and Theses in Art and Design’, in The Sage Handbook of Digital Dissertations and Theses, ed. by Richard Andrews, Erik Borg, Stephen Boyd Davis, Myrrh Domingo, and Jude England (London: SAGE Publications, 2012), pp. 339–54 (p. 342). 9. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (New York: Doubleday, 1966; repr. New York: Anchor Books, 1967), p. 4. 10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. by Gertrude Elisabeth Margaret Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953; 3rd ed. repr. 1986), p. 159, §610. 11. See: Rolf Hughes, ‘Pressures of the unspeakable: Communicating practice as research’, in Communicating (by) Design, ed. by Johan Verbeke and Adam Jakimowicz (Gothenburg/ Brussels: Chalmers University of Technology/Sint-Lucas School of Architecture, 2009), pp. 247–59; Ronald Jones, ‘Omphaloskepsis’, Frieze, 14 May 2009 [accessed 24 June 2021]. 12. Judith Butler, ‘Giving an Account of Oneself’, Diacritics, 31.4 (2001), 22–40 . 13. Research Catalogue: An International Database for Artistic Research [accessed 24 June 2021]. 14. Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine, Implementing the Government Performance and Results Act for Research: A Status Report (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2001), pp. 11–12. 15. Swedish Research Council, Research Quality Evaluation in Sweden—Fokus (Stockholm: Swedish Research Council, 2015), p. 27 [accessed 24 June 2021]. 16. Borgdorf, The Confict of the Faculties, p. 209. 17. Ibid., p. 210. 18. In ‘Art of Experience: Alchemy, Passions, Embodied/ Practical Knowledge and Transformation’, To Research or Not to Research in the PostDisciplinary Academy?, Vilnius, 15 October 2021, Rachel Armstrong and I discussed how the fgure of the alchemist allows for a more inclusive, complex story of knowledge synthesis, inviting more complex approaches for evaluating artistic research.

Inquiries

Inquiries 25

Archival practices

26

Archival practices

Archival practices 27

Verrall

Archival practices

Situational perhapsing Ray Verrall

28

This chapter describes the employment of such an approach in my current doctoral research—a project that aims to map the dynamics, explore the tensions, and unpick the myths surrounding the situation of the 1958 Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Oxford Conference on Architectural Education, a pivotal moment in shaping British architectural culture. About the RIBA Oxford Conference Until the implementation in the early 1960s of the several recommendations arising from the Oxford Conference, British architecture students followed a variety of routes into the profession, each with difering standards and defnitions of education and training. Aiming to raise these standards and unify qualifcation

criteria, the conference efectively severed architectural education from its vocational hinterland, reinventing it exclusively as an academic endeavour and establishing frameworks of professionalisation, modes of pedagogy, and ideas about research that dominated for decades. For something so consequential, surprisingly little scholarship has been undertaken to map the machinations around its organisation and the values encoded in its agenda. Our knowledge is based primarily on chairman Sir Leslie Martin’s summary— supposedly an uncontested account of a non-divisive weekend event, the conclusions of which apparently attracted ‘no efective opposition.’4 When the report was published, further details emerged about how the conference had encouraged ‘frank’ discussion in order to ‘bring out as much informed opinion as possible’ from those ‘who were known to have views to express.’5 Yet, the report refected little of this diversity, essentially silencing whatever opinion may have been voiced by those attendees not aligned with the conference’s technocratic faction (associated with Martin). Indeed, the discussions must have been contentious enough for

My creative approach to architectural history responds particularly to issues of archival lacunae. I work with ‘perhapsing’ as a mode of research and representation, a method which gains its utility from mapping—and extending beyond—the edges of the available evidence. When signifcant gaps in the archival record are encountered, and other sources exhausted, perhapsing enables the content of those gaps to be fgured out creatively through rigorous informed speculation.

Situational perhapsing

Historical inquiry is inherently creative. Since the past cannot be ‘apprehended directly’,1 but rather only through an ‘already historicised’ archival record,2 our understanding of past events is largely generated from the retrospective confguration of possible stories. Such narratives may be described as sites of both excavation and construction, where a plot reveals or suggests itself through dialogue between the invented and the found.3

29

Verrall

Martin to later suggest that ‘it would be unfortunate if the discussions were to appear in the popular press.’6 We know that verbatim transcripts of the conference discussions were made. One copy was used by Martin while constructing his report, and another was kept in the ofce of Everard (Jim) Haynes, Secretary to the Board of Architectural Education. Both were subsequently lost or destroyed. However, other supporting material remains. For example, the minutes of the RIBA Council, the Board, and the Conference Organising Committee document the development of the conference agenda and its evolving list of invitees. These records also reveal shifting attitudes towards the conference between inception and realisation, and illustrate a wide range of contemporary contexts, motivations, and concerns. Sometimes, deliberations are recorded in the minutes themselves, but often it is the attached correspondence and memos that reveal the reasoning behind decisions, and the dynamics between the actors involved.

the situation of the conference. Human actors are described as characters, though sometimes more specifcally as protagonists when representing a particular position or agenda. The agency of nonhuman actors may enable them to also be considered as protagonists. Such terms intentionally borrow from fction and literary criticism. Fifty-two individuals (ffty-one male!) attended the conference. In constructing outline biographical profles for each of them, I have endeavoured to obtain an understanding of their professional backgrounds, social connections, cultural values, and likely views upon the various conference themes (Figure 1.1). Where possible, I have sought more anecdotal evidence of personality. My use of the term mapping in this project refers to both an intellectual, interpretative task (informed by frameworks of social theory) and a graphic, organisational one (using software tool kumu.io). Both inform the other in an attempt to make sense of, or ascribe meaning to, an otherwise ‘tangled mass of discontinuities.’7 Rather than being objects

Sleuthing and mapping of evidence in themselves, however, the By sleuthing around such archival clues, diagrammatic maps have functioned fragments of a plot may be identifed. By primarily as working tools to help organmapping these fragments against wider ise and provide visual representations of biographical, contextual, and theoretical key relationships (Figure 1.2). insights, provisional narratives may then Through mapping the connections be constructed, illustrating the entanglebetween characters and other actors— ment of cultural conditions and the value such as professional bodies, educational systems of actors. institutions, government ministries, My defnition of actors is broad, and more nebulous collectives—these including (though not limited to) persons, entities have become, as historiographer groups, institutions, and discourses either Keith Jenkins describes, ‘modestly and directly involved or indirectly conditioning “provisionally integrated” with one another

30

David Beaty-Pownall

Frank Chippindale

Ronald Dingwall-Smith

Harvey Frost

Thomas Hall

Raymond Saunders

Thomas Thoms

Charles White

Situational perhapsing

1.1 Biographical profles of all 52 conference attendees were constructed by the author.

1.2 Network-mapping software (kumu.io) was used to help make sense of connections between multiple actors.

31

as occupants of a shared context.’8 It is by such methods that I have been able to determine how pieces of evidence (broadly defned) may be arranged to construct meaningful narratives, or to ‘authentically reconstruct the discourses’9 that conditioned the situation of the conference. Perhapsing The idea of perhapsing is informed by diverse historians, theorists, and creative writers,10 and treats history as ‘the realm

Verrall

of the inexact’11—something speculative and provisional but nevertheless ‘an endeavour toward better understanding.’12 Although historian Hayden White famously observed that ‘the contents of [historical narratives] are as much invented as found’,13 this does not imply the conjuring of stories from raw imagination, but rather the consideration of clues and suggestions discovered through research, and the development of plots that reveal possibilities of meaning. Indeed, it is only after more conventional investigative methods have been used—through tracing the outlines of evidential limits and lacunae and establishing the extent of the knowable14—that the potential for perhapsing becomes possible. As cultural historian Will Pooley has written: When a historian comes up against a crucial absence, a moment of great narrative or causal signifcance for which there is very little evidence, they deploy all their skills to research around this lacuna, and to provide a ‘perhaps’ that has to stand for what happened. [But] this small fction is the output of specialist investigation.15

32

Historians have long acknowledged the partiality of their narratives through words and expressions like ‘perhaps’, ‘probably’, ‘should have’, and ‘one may presume’.16 Whenever we encounter such phrases, we may identify the inventive/fctive faculty in operation. Recent decades have seen historians and others increasingly embrace such understandings through the ‘interweaving and layering of diferent genres, modes and temporalities’ in their work.17 This has largely been efected through the erosion, deformation, or transgression of traditional disciplinary boundaries.18 Within genres of writing, borderline discourses such as fctocriticism, counterfactual history, and creative non-fction use their ‘methodological impurity’19 not to erase or invalidate distinctions between fact and fction, or the evidential and speculative, but to show that there are other, more useful ways to think about them.20 Vignettes My project employs two main modes of perhapsing. The frst is the construction of a series of short situational vignettes that introduce some of the conference’s protagonists in the decades preceding it. As I noticed how particular actors tended to converge around certain discourses and experiences, I identifed several distinct situations that could be creatively dramatised to critically illustrate their connections and milieus, exploring thematic ideas in ways that aim to evoke the atmosphere of the time. 1.3 One of several situational vignettes constructed by the author. © Author, 2021

pher Roland Barthes describes. The vignette shown (Figure 1.3) is set at a specifc moment in the 1930s when the MARS group had just formed, the Architects Registration Act had recently passed, and schools like the Regent Street Polytechnic were undergoing radical change. It also provides a glimpse into the part-time apprenticeship route to qualifcation. Our protagonist, architect Edward Mills, would eventually serve on the Conference Organising Committee. Transcripts My other mode of perhapsing responds specifcally to the lacuna of the lost conference transcripts. Their absence provides a direct opportunity to critically imagine, through (re)construction, how the proceedings may have played out, bringing the characters together dialogically and dramatically to probe the ‘complexities and potentialities’ of the tensions involved.23 Whereas the vignettes aim toward a distillation of ideas already identifed during the sleuthing and mapping process, the transcripts confgure themselves gradually—like collage—through

the process of their own composition (Figure 1.4). The vignettes rely largely on the telling detail and short, conversational dialogue (or internal monologue, as in the Mills excerpt), but the longer form of the transcripts allows for the use of more discursive quotes and statements as source material for rhetorical exchanges. Like the vignettes, I have sought where possible to use the characters’ own words—though taken out of their original contexts—in perhapsing their contributions. Thus, although the transcripts are ultimately invented constructions, their content is ‘held tightly in check by the voices of the past.’24 Certain details about the conference proceedings can be established from Martin’s report and the ofcial agenda, including: the venue of Magdalen College, Oxford; the dates of 11–13 April 1958; the sequencing and rough timing of the various sessions; the outline of topics discussed; and the identity of those who presented papers. Some details were also shared with the press. The conference sessions may be understood as discrete acts within a play, each with their own ‘agōnes, or semi-formal debates’,25 yet contributing to the overall framing of a plot. In treating the conference as a dramatic event, the attendees become a cast of characters, playing particular roles and enacting debate on my behalf, much like how Plato also cast real historical fgures as characters in his dialogues, and spoke through them. There is clearly an ethical consideration to be made regarding the turning of real individuals into written characters. Yet, in my conscious ventriloquising of the

Situational perhapsing

Where possible, I am using direct quotes by or about the characters as the basis for narrative construction. Nevertheless, these are often restructured or decontextualised to such an extent that their origin becomes unimportant. Indeed, words, phrases, associations, and descriptive details are used not only for their relevance to the situation’s theme, but also for their texture21 and plausibility in expressing the ‘having-been-there of things’,22 as literary theorist and philoso-

35

characters, I am efectively fusing my voice with theirs. Regardless of which character is speaking, I ultimately remain the ‘superspeaker’26 by merit of my own selection, positioning, distortion, or invention of the material.27 Conclusion The past is elusive and necessarily speculative. But although historical research can never fully reconstruct past events or situations in all their messy complexity and ambiguity, it can broaden our understanding of the discourses and tensions that conditioned them, making ‘palpably present what is absent, but in ways that remain always approximate.’28 It is through

Verrall

such realisation, and with such justifcation, that we may learn to embrace the limitations of archival lacunae and creatively push beyond the edges of evidence. In doing so, we can forge new ways of knowing and seeing the familiar, re-engaging with previously dormant discourse and problematising former assumptions—not necessarily by proving them false, but simply by enabling a wider spectrum of possible questions.

Figure credits Portraits shown in Figure 1.1 reproduced with kind permission of Richard Beaty-Pownall, Kate Spinoza, Richard Dingwall-Smith, Harvey Giles Frost, Brian David Hall, Richard Saunders, Andrew Thoms, and Helena Burchell.

38

1.4 Excerpt from the author’s ‘perhapsed’ conference transcripts— physically typewritten, then digitally composited with paper textures photographed from 1950s RIBA archive documents. © Author, 2021

1. Hayden White, ‘Response to Arthur Marwick’, Journal of Contemporary History, 30.2 (1995), 233–46 (p. 243). 2. Keith Jenkins, On ‘What Is History?’: From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 48. 3. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 82. 4. ‘RIBA Architectural Education Conference’, Architects’ Journal, 17 April 1958, p. 563. 5. Leslie Martin, ‘Conference on Architectural Education’, RIBA Journal, June 1958, pp. 279–82 (p. 279). 6. Meeting of the Board of Architectural Education,

Domesticity and Desire in 1930s Paris (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 4. 15. Will Pooley, ‘The Historical Imagination’, History/ Folklore/Writing, 6 December 2017, [unpag.] [accessed 1 April 2021]. 16. Carlo Ginzburg, Threads and Traces: True False Fictive, trans. by Anne Tedeschi and John Tedeschi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p. 57. 17. Sean Gaston, Jacques Derrida and the Challenge of History (London: Rowman and Littlefeld, 2019), p. 109. 18. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. by Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 52. 19. Anna Gibbs, ‘Fictocriticism, Afect, Mimesis: Engendering Diferences’, TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses [Online], 9.1 (2005)

[accessed 1 April 2021]. 20. Will Pooley, ‘Creative Writing as a Tool of Sustained Ignorance’, Storying the Past, 5 June 2018, [unpag.] [accessed 1 April 2021]. 21. Douglas Hesse, ‘The Place of Creative Nonfction’, College English, 65.3 (2003), 237–41 (p. 239). 22. Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Efect’, in The Rustle of Language, by Roland Barthes, trans. by Richard Howard (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1989), pp. 141–48 (p. 147). Italics in original. 23. Lisa Landrum, ‘History and Histrionics: Dramatizing Architectural Inquiry’, in Made: Design Education and the Art of Making, ed. by Brandon Bergem and Nicole Hunt (Charlotte: University of North Carolina, 2010), pp. 17–24 (p. 20). 24. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 5. 25. Ruby Blondell, The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 15. 26. Michael Issacharof, Discourse as Performance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 3. 27. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. by Donald F. Bouchard, trans. by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 128. 28. Lisa Landrum, ‘Varieties of Architectural Imagination’, in Warehouse 25, ed. by Alena Rieger and Ally Pereira-Edwards (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 2016), pp. 71–83 (p. 72).

Situational perhapsing

19 May 1958, Board of Architectural Education Minutes, 1930–1967, RIBA/ED, RIBA Archive, London, p. 8. 7. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. by A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 6. 8. Jenkins, On ‘What Is History?’, p. 156. 9. Jessica Kelly, ‘Discourses, Ephemeral Sources, and Architectural History: Personality and the Personal in the Story of J.M. Richards’, in Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research, ed. by Janina Gosseye, Naomi Stead, and Deborah Van der Plaat (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2019), pp. 76–93 (p. 81). 10. Lisa Knopp appears to be the frst to have used the term in its present meaning. See: Lisa Knopp, ‘“Perhapsing”: The Use of Speculation in Creative Nonfction’, Brevity: a Journal of Concise Literary Nonfction, 8 January 2009, [unpag.] [accessed 1 April 2021]. 11. Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), p. 76. 12. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. by Peter Putnam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1954), pp. 10–11. 13. White, Tropics of Discourse, p. 82. Italics in original. 14. Emma Cheatle, PartArchitecture: The Maison de Verre, Duchamp,

39

Mason

Archival practices

Draught/draf papers Ashley Mason

40

Draught and draft are spelling variants, often though not always interchangeable. Draught, in British English, has multiple meanings.1 It may be felt as a wind whistles inside a building, reminding us of openings in its envelope—the breach may be inconspicuous, but the chill can be haunting, leaving our bodies shivering, aching, caught. We resort to sealants: a refusal to admit our faults, to permit rogue actors and anomalies. Artists and authors have exploited gaps, yet architecture remains insistent on their omission. Draught screens were once employed to help the sick to heal. They were frequently painted to tell stories, with exquisite depictions of palaces or landscapes, formed of upper and lower panels—the bride and her bachelors. Now, sometimes only fragments of these fragile scafold structures remain. What evolved out of the faults wouldn’t have otherwise, had there not been a fssure in the architectural fabric. Indeed, without the screen, the draft wouldn’t have been (architecturally) seen. Draught’s (or draft’s) etymological origins may be traced to dragan:2 to draw, to drag, to drag oneself along, to drag along

the panels, to unfold them as a dragon unfolds its body, section by section. So it is to be a draughts/draftswoman, slowly unfurling our fre. To draft, in British English, is to draw up, to sketch, to outline, to draft a document. Its consequents are non-fnal versions, surplus or side-lined editions, reams of paper or lines of code to one-day be burned or recycled. Rough drafts are soon abandoned once the fnal copy is submitted to the printer or repository. It is rare for prior iterations to be drawn upon; deemed inferior, they are more inclined to disappear. The narrow, dressed border around the face of a stone is known as a drafted margin. Drafts are therefore also in the character of residuals, edges, fringes. There are no limitations on how many drafts may be drafted; no guidance prevails for how to determine when these tentative compositions have transitioned to a defnitive. Perhaps the drafting process is, despite any assertion of approaching fnality, forever drawn-out through errata, corrigenda, and revised editions. Maybe I’m drawing-out this opening? Exhausted, we withdraw to our withdrawing rooms. This chapter has been drafted in two parts: frst, an appendix, a commentary

In this chapter, I draw on draught/draf fgures borne of the fringes, on supplemental gestures replete with spaces for slippages, or craters akin to those Furin cleavage sites where unknowns and other opportunities may slip-in. I have drafed my text in two parts: frst, an appendix, a commentary on an exhibition of my creative practice research—a supplement to an inheritance of supplements; and, second, a refection on my creative practice.

Draught/draft papers

Draughty/drafty

41

on an exhibition of my creative practice research—a supplement to an inheritance of supplements; second, a refection on my creative practice. These two parts are supported by a series of unearthed, and newly earthed, photographic, textual, and drawn fgures capturing and extending the creative practice of my thesis. For it is, I propose, within such typically cast aside drafts that we may draw-out the draughtholes, the gaps, the craters3 where other opportunities may slip in.

Mason

42

Draughting/drafting ‘Paralipomena’ (October 2018) was an exhibition that was an errant archive of another exhibition, ‘Craters’ (February 2018), that never actually took place. ‘Craters’ and the accompanying Craters (2018; rev edn, 2019) exhibition catalogue were themselves a supplement to my doctoral thesis, ‘Towards a Paracontextual Practice* (*with footnotes to “Parallel of Life and Art”)’ (2019),4 enveloping a series of feminist creative-critical, textual-spatial explorations through which paracontextual practice was developed and demonstrated. Paralleled by experiences within the Nigel Henderson Collection held at Tate Archive while trying to locate two missing images—of a meteor crater and the excavation site of a skyscraper—found (or, rather, lost) within the Independent Group’s 1953 exhibition, ‘Parallel of Life and Art’,5 the exhibition ‘Paralipomena’, too, was comprised of scattered remnants pertaining to the fctional ‘Craters’ exhibition. Not all of the pieces survived intact; not all of the pieces could be relocated. As with the archival fragments of ‘Parallel of Life and Art’, ambiguity abounded. Not all

of the answers could be found; not all of the narratives evidenced—in footnotes, in fantômes—were reliable. What followed was an attempt to reconnect the dots— the craters—and to piece together these prior paracontextual endeavours, in order to further the agendas of paracontextual practice. Paracontextual practice is a practice through which the marginal and supplementary phenomena of an ‘empty’ site—whether ‘emptied’ through extraction, demolition, or impact—might be acknowledged rather than disregarded, might be drawn upon rather than overlooked in favour of the conveniences of the tabula rasa. It is indebted to those already attending to marginalised site matters,6 and to site-writing,7 drawing on the works of artists, land-activists, and poets.8 The thesis sought to creatively yet critically interrogate the oft-uneasy implications of architectural production’s relationships to lands, landscapes, or sites.9 In other words, the research sought to support, through precedents, an acceptance of inheritance and a reassertion of context within spatial practices such as architecture.10 ‘Paralipomena’ was an exhibition that supported my doctoral thesis, yet rather than recreate the fctional ‘Craters’ exhibition of the Craters exhibition catalogue, as may have been expected (and which duly, though happily, frustrated the audience), the exhibition instead further revelled in the serendipities that can occur when records are committed to an archive (and which I had observed within my own archival research).11 Replicas, misplacements, erroneous editions—it

photographer Nigel Henderson’s own documentary evidencing of the Independent Group’s exhibition. A lot of the pieces were subsequently stored, though some of the frames have since been repurposed. The installation photographs, however, remained as pixels, accessible only ever to an audience of one until the moment of this publication’s printing. This chapter includes a couple of these images,

‘Parallel of Life and Art’ exhibition had also been. I made sure to document its installation rigorously through a series of photographs, a task inspired by

selected for their ambiguity. Returning to these copies of copies, I immediately recovered the sensation borne out of the never-ending nature of reproduction

Draught/draft papers

was even an investigative process to recover, for this chapter, the photographs that I had taken of the installation within the entrance foyer of the Architecture Building, Newcastle University, now so long ago. So many folders; too many fles, overwhelmed by duplicates and back-ups, just in case one copy should go astray. The exhibition was exhibited only briefy, a feeting gesture, just as the

2.1 You May Have Seen Me. © Author, 2018

43

that at times consumed me during my research. Paralipomenon: ‘a supplement or appendix to a text’.12 The ‘Paralipomena’ exhibition was produced as a support to the thesis document, a scattering of fragments. Yet, despite this peripherality, its value and contribution were undoubtedly intrinsic. Through the drafting of this chapter, the ‘Paralipomena’ exhibition and my thesis continue to be added to. They, thus, will never reach completion. Paracontextual practice infltrates this understanding and capitalises on the ellipses that may be found, waiting in the spaces in-between.

6 Figures The frst fgure is a photograph found and presumed to be of the ‘Paralipomena’ installation that reveals one of its pieces, itself claimed to be of the original ‘Craters’ exhibition and to have featured within the original catalogue as part of a piece titled You’ve Never Seen Me (2018) (Figure 2.1). The printer skips, trips over the letters. An accidental serendipity. An error that might have been crumpled and thrown away in pursuit of perfection, in-keeping within original intentions, but sometimes errors are opportunities for creative play. The text disintegrates into the cavity-flled surface of the Portland stone of which

Mason 2.2 Above the Fold Line. © Author, 2018

44

piece reinstated the hitherto absent contributions of the female fgures of the ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ exhibition,15 by suggesting the admission of their voices

to the archive, the associated exhibit in ‘Paralipomena’ instead elevated the once empty folder now containing their voices to attention. Without those that fold and unfold such limb-hinge-limbs, and without those who have folded, or have been left in limbo, the initial intervention would not have had such a powerful reading. So it is that the role of the folder is, here, acknowledged. For the third fgure we fnd a collage constructed as found of a web of text, trace, and pencil building relations across disciplines, observations, and refections mirroring works of land-artist Robert Smithson and spatial practitioner Julieanna Preston (Figure 2.3)—of strata, fow, and openings.16 Endpapers, also known as wastesheets, have been variously marbled leaves, repetitive patterns, mappings, leftover scraps of material, holding together the main text. In this

Draught/draft papers

architects Alison and Peter Smithson’s Economist Building is constructed. Later, I, too, collapsed into the craters—you may have seen me.13 The second fgure: another refection (Figure 2.2). The folder of a piece titled Bare Chambers (2018) seemingly recovered from the archive, set inside a frame. We are often swayed by cover-stories, yet less swift to acknowledge their infuence on our attention. This blank folder ofers an empty echo of artist Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass (1912–1923)—from which emerged The White Box (1967), a collection of notes excluded from The Green Box (1934)—that inspired poet Caroline Bergvall’s ‘About Face’ in Fig (2005), or ‘just close enough’.14 While the Craters

2.3 Beneath the Seams. © Author, with quotations from Alison Smithson (various sources), 2018–2021

45

Mason

fgure, further leftovers from the thesis are collaged with, within, and over the geological drawing used as an endpaper within the Craters catalogue, previously overlooked. The supplementation of Economist Plaza plan re-drawings with Portland Stone geological patterning, interspersed with a textual series of openings from which the thesis (may have) issued forth one winter’s night, adds further to the hinge between the sites of extraction and of construction, holding doorways ajar to other possibilities. The next fgure unveils a preface page taken from drafts of the thesis with one of my supervisor’s annotations (Figure 2.4). It’s hard to remember all of the versions and iterations—some of the writing feels alien to me now, as if it never spilled from my fngertips. In truth, the thesis is entirely compromised by the fngertips of others. Every writing is underpinned by priors akin to The Making of the Pré (1971) of poet Francis Ponge—a book of drafts.17 Each

of, out of frame, though our shadows remain to give our shy presence away. Each of the fgures concerns a paratext—marginal glosses; covers; endpapers; annotations and erasures; footnotes; inserted leaves—and all are illustrations accompanied by brief commentaries as part of an appendix to the exhibition. They are fgures that didn’t have a voice until this moment. Indeed, perhaps all of these new additions, or previously unseen omissions—the supplementary phenomena subsequent, or deemed irrelevant, to the thesis submission—need to be appended to the thesis’ record and deposited, like the inserted leaves of Bare Chambers, within the thesis’ archival box (Figure 2.6).18

efort is another Fig, another mourning of meadows as we tidy tidy tidy and re-seed. Here, the left-overs are left-in and, as such, the focus is shifted from output to process. With every caret we reveal our care for continuance, for renewal, for recurrence. As such, little stars are always emerging, as we see in the ffth fgure (Figure 2.5). The last wandering of Little Stars (2018) indicated ‘to be continued’; it is, here, continued, as the seventh star and an ode to the lost Pleiade. We are found staring down on the pavement of the Economist Plaza, our feet once more cut 2.4 Out of the Meadow. © Author and Adam Sharr, 2018

46

Continued. Tere are supposed to be seven, but we’re at the mercy of myopia. Diferent grays ficker as we squint into the cosmological abyss. A dedication to shyness and subtlety, treading sofly, not too sofly, not so sofly as to put pathways in jeopardy. We must continue to call outlets if we wish to circle into the misty deep. Te forest heaves. Fires have ofen raged in lower chambers, burning branches, below landscapes littered with asterisks, ifs, and too many open tabs turned over to the edges exposing our frangible states to a suite of maybes. Drip drip drip. We’ve given up on plain sailing, as waves reign down upon the cavities. We must reach higher ground and elevate our heirs and ancestors from their gravity, then we might stand a chance of catching a glimpse of the missing dove.

Draught/draft papers

*******

2.5 Little Stars (Continued). © Author, 2021

47

Un-draught/draft-proofng

Mason

48

The allocated pages of this chapter were perhaps intended for an eloquent summary of and refection on the creative practice employed within my research, much as the allocated wall for my exhibition was perhaps intended to have ofered a conventional display of all of the outcomes of the research’s creative practice. In both, I have resisted any expectations—what are we without play? Creative practice is inherently iterative; it is incessant drawing and re-drawing, re-tracing footnotes and footsteps of ourselves and others. It can be difcult to commit, drafting drafting drafting, as we step inside ourselves and our buildings, drawing from contemporary feminist philosophy and creative practice, reaching for the otherhow.19 The supplements become ceaseless. With this chapter, so it seems, the thesis continues further still. Draughts, or drafts, are paratextual.20 They are matters of thresholds, parerga.21 Standing before the ‘Paralipomena’ installation, I was prompted to refect on why the thresholds or margins were found to be so important to me. My response: I have been drawn to the margins because I see myself refected in them—as a female, marginalised—and because I care for their acceptance and admission within spatial practices such as, though not limited to, architecture.22 Through my work I am inquiring into what is lost when we seal of boundaries and thwart the traversal of thresholds, and what means we might employ to ensure their permeability. The fgures featured within this chapter are only a small part of my own journey, a continuing path not always legible or

clear-cut, that plays with opacity. In this way, I allow myself to yield, like Preston, to ‘non-linear thinking and discovery in the face of not-knowing what lies ahead’.23 Creative practice is, for me, how we may let the potential of openings breathe, let the draughts permeate, without being afraid of drafting and redrafting, of coincidence, of wandering from plans or predefned intentions. For the future, as always, will be shaped by our response to the gaps and margins.

2.6 (Overleaf ) The Black Box. © Author, 2021 1. Oxford English Dictionary (OED). 2. OED etymology. 3. Ashley Mason, ‘Craters: Between Cleared and Constructed, Between Absent and Present’, Interstices, 17: Return to Origins (2016), 54–66 . 4. Ashley Mason, ‘Towards a Paracontextual Practice* (*with footnotes to “Parallel of Life and Art”)’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Newcastle University, 2019). 5. Nigel Henderson, ‘Notes on Parallel of Life and Art’ (1953), Tate Gallery Archive (TGA), Nigel Henderson Collection (NHC), TGA 9211.5.1.6. 6. Carol J. Burns, ‘On Site: Architectural Preoccupations’, in Drawing/Building/Text, ed. by Andrea Kahn (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991), pp. 146–67; Andrea Kahn, ‘Overlooking: A Look at How We Look at Site or ... Site as Discrete Object of Desire’, in Desiring Practices: Architecture,

New Press, 2014); Rebecca Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2001). 10. Steve McCafery and bp. Nichol, Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine: The Collected Research Reports of the Toronto Research Group, 1973–82 (Vancouver: Talon Books, 2008), pp. 132, 154. 11. Ashley Mason, ‘Thin Sheets: Tracing openings within the archival matter of Alison and Peter Smithson’, in The Routledge Companion to Architectural Drawings and Models: From Translating to Archiving, Collecting and Displaying, ed. by Federica Gof (London: Routledge, 2022). 12. OED. 13. Blow-Up, dir. by Michelangelo Antonioni (MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, 1967). 14. Caroline Bergvall, Fig (Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2005). 15. Including Alison. See, for example, Alison Smithson, ‘The City Centre Full of Holes’, Architectural Associaton Quarterly, 9.2/3 (1977), 3–23. 16. Robert Smithson, ‘Strata: A Geo-photographic Fiction’, Aspen, 8 (1970) [unpag.]; Julieanna Preston, ‘Blazing Inter Alia: Tropes of a Feminist Creative Practice’, in Feminist Practices: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Women in Architecture, ed. by Lori A. Brown (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 99–122. 17. Francis Ponge, The Making of the Pré [La fabrique du Pré] (Genève: Skira, 1971; repr. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979). With

thanks to Katie Lloyd Thomas for introducing me to his work. 18. Perhaps sealed until an unknown date, with inspiration from: Superstudio, ‘Hidden Architecture’, Design Quarterly, 78/79 (1970), 54–58. 19. Katie Lloyd Thomas, ‘Building while being in it: notes on drawing ‘otherhow’’, in Altering Practices: Feminist Politics and Poetics of Space, ed. by Doina Petrescu (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 89–112. 20. Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Paris: Seuil, 1987; repr. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 21. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Double Session’, in Dissemination, trans. by Barbara Johnson (Paris: Seuil, 1972; repr. London: Continuum, 2004); Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. by Geofrey Bennington (Paris: Flammarion, 1978; repr. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Jacques Derrida, ‘Living On: Borderlines’, trans. by James Hulbert, in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. by Harold Bloom and others (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), pp. 75–176. 22. María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 23. Preston, ‘Blazing Inter Alia’, p. 103.

Draught/draft papers

Gender and the Interdisciplinary, ed. by Katerina Rüedi, Sarah Wigglesworth, and Duncan McCorquodale (London: Black Dog Publishing, 1996), pp. 174–85; Carol J. Burns and Andrea Kahn (eds.), Site Matters: Design Concepts, Histories and Strategies (London: Routledge, 2005). 7. Jane Rendell, Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010); Emma Cheatle, ‘Between Landscape and Confnement: Situating the Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft’, in Architecture and Feminism: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies, ed. by Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson, and Helen Runting (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 66–80; Kristen Kreider, Poetics + Place: The Architecture of Sign, Subject and Site (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014). 8. Caroline Bergvall, Éclat (Lowestoft: Sound and Language, 1996); Sophie Calle, What Do You See? (exhibition catalogue) (Boston, MA: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2012); Roni Horn, Another Water (Göttingen: Steidl, 2000); Katrina Palmer, End Matter (London: Bookworks, 2015); Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Ofce for Soft Architecture (Astoria, OR: Clear Cut Press, 2003; repr. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2011); Robert Smithson, ‘QuasiInfnities and the Waning of Space’, Arts Magazine, 41.1 (1966), 28–31; amongst others. 9. Lucy R. Lippard, Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West (London: The

49

Mason

50

Ofce practices

Ofce practices 51

Megahed

Ofce practices

Storying Practiceopolis Yasser Megahed

52

research needs to produce knowledge that is valid, original, and transferable for the whole research community and not just for the practitioners involved.2 This chapter will present an example of my own practice-based research inquiry which involved producing an architecturally-themed graphic novel as a method for communicating the research process and visualising its argument critically. The research The direction of this research investigates on-going struggles for economic and cultural capital among the actors operating in the contemporary architectural profession and across the UK building industry. It concentrates on the domination of what

can be called a technical-rational ideology over the values of contemporary construction processes. The term refers to a set of values related to practicality, productivity, audit accountability, and performance management that have dominated building production from the second half of the twentieth century, where large corporations drove economic progress.3 The research interrogates the origin and the outcomes of the domination of these values and their association with the increasing complexities of contemporary construction and what the architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas describes as the culture of architectural ‘Bigness’.4 It draws on diverse literature about architectural professionalism and its challenges within the contemporary global building industry, with reference to the works of Koolhaas, sociologist Leslie Sklair, sociologist Robert Gutman, and architectural theorist Dana Cuf on the particularities of the architectural profession and the imperative of global capitalism upon them.5 In addition, the research builds upon architect, writer, and educator Jeremy Till’s critique of architects’ self-image and claims of autonomy, as well as architect and historian Flora Samuel’s works on

I explored competing ideologies at work among actors in the building process through an architecturally themed graphic novel, produced as practice-based research. Te research elaborates upon the genre of the graphic novel as a method for conducting and communicating research, in a way that brings down some of the barriers obstructing such research from being accessible and transferable.

Storying Practiceopolis

Practice-based research methodologies are gaining greater capital in architectural academe under the relatively new umbrella of research-by-design. While acquiring more traction, one of the deep challenges facing this type of research is its tacit and personal nature which, some assume, may limit it from developing what can be called accessible and transferable ‘Research’ with an uppercase ‘R’: the type of research linked to formal academic processes of inquiry.1 To do so, practice-based

53

the value of the architect.6 The research broadly aims to warn of the danger of the increasing infuence of technical-rational values on the architectural profession. It argues that this domination may lead to marginalising the distinctive humanistic values of the architectural profession and its historical legacy, making it increasingly liable to agendas associated with technical-rational ideology. The practice-based research The research invokes what philosopher Donald Schön would call an exercise in refective practice.7 The practice involved

Megahed

54

refects upon the author’s role as part of the architectural design team for the refurbishment of a Grade II listed building in the UK, in which diferent value systems played out between actors involved in the project. The connection with the broader

research inquiry emerged from the progress and value-engineering meetings that occurred during the project. These meetings highlighted the presence of heterogeneous ideologies and values among the participants, as disclosed explicitly and implicitly through their verbal and written bureaucratic exchanges concerning diferent issues during design and construction. The project team included our practice, Design Ofce, as the concept architects, as well as quantity surveyors, engineering consultants, the contractor, a multinational project management company as the CDM coordinator, and a facility management service acting as the client’s advisor. The ideology of most of these participants were tied to values which might be characterised as technical-rational: generic in their architectural ambition, lacking strong social and civic qualities,

3.1 Map of the city of Practiceopolis within Constructopolis—the confederation of the building industry. © Author, 2020

building production, and to refect upon the challenges facing the architectural profession due to the increasing adoption of technical-rational values by the broader mainstream building production industry. The graphic novel In order to translate this refective-practice exercise into accessible, transferable ‘Research’, I re-narrated the various issues that occurred in the progress and value

engineering meetings in the form of an architecturally-themed graphic novel, published as: Practiceopolis: Stories from the Architectural Profession (2020).8 The novel relocated the meetings and events of the project into the fctional setting of the imaginary city of Practiceopolis. The novel presents Practiceopolis as a fctive city-state that represents the contemporary architectural profession, and which is located within the island of ‘Constructopolis—the confederation of the building industry’. Through its diferent stories, the novel dramatises the exchanges that took place in the project as conficts between the city of Practiceopolis and the confederation of the building industry, both advocating competing visions for the future trajectory of the imaginary city. Through these stories, the novel exposes the

Storying Practiceopolis

while often leaning more towards practicality and performance audit. These values appeared diferent not only to the values of our practice but to certain priorities of architectural discourse under-rated by this technical-rational ideology. The project, its meetings and correspondence, therefore provided an opportunity to interrogate the dialogue between the diverse actors and their competing ideologies to

3.2 Excerpts from the Graphic Novel: The Atkinson Building Stories. © Author, 2020

55

Megahed

56

Methodological devices The graphic novel employs a set of unique methodological devices that include design fction, storytelling, and cartoons. Artist, technologist, and researcher Julian Bleecker defnes design fction—or what can be called ‘thinking through fction’— as a method for exploring unconventional approaches to making and seeing beyond expected conclusions without the pragmatic curtailing of reality.9 It aims to remove the constraints of what is claimed as ‘realistic’ and to distance our thinking from that which is too close to what we already know. The novel employs certain aspects from design fction’s toolbox: projection, experimental systems, and multitude.10 The format of the novel makes a space for projection: the possibility for the creation of other worlds in relation to the actual world. This is evident in the setting of the novel in the parallel world of the fctional city of Practiceopolis as a metaphor of the contemporary architectural profession. This imaginary setting, in turn, acts as an experimental system, which allows for the bringing together of a multitude of perspectives and arguments about the architectural profession and its relations with other actors in the

industry. The novel therefore ofers a site for the analysis of those views through the lens of understanding the multiplicity of architectural practices, rather than from the exclusive position of a single one. Equally, the novel employs the power of storytelling to build up the argument of the research. This power has always been a key part of the architectural communication skillset. Architects usually tell stories to share their ideas and views within the diferent conversations that take place during the process of a building’s design and manifestation. In these communications, decisions are made through discussions and exchanges of opinions where the winning argument is often the one that extends the most convincing story.11 The graphic novel therefore deploys the device of storytelling to present the communications and exchanges that commonly occur across the duration of architectural projects, depicting the conficting values and priorities that manifest among actors of the building industry, as well as the architect’s position within these communications. The novel employs the distinctive medium of cartooning to bring the act of storytelling into the visual world. It enables the visualisation of everyday tacit routines in architecture, and makes them prominent and tangible, ready for extracting research insights from them. The explicit clarity associated with this medium—in terms of conveying ideas, as

Storying Practiceopolis

politics at work behind everyday routines within practice that often go unnoticed. Drawing from meeting minutes, the text of emails, and various architectural and extra-architectural discussions, the novel presents the ideological values of those actors and tries to understand their varied disciplinary positions in relation to professional situations in the building production process.

3.3 (Far left) Excerpts from the Graphic Novel: The Clashes. © Author, 2020 3.4 (Overleaf ) Excerpts from the Graphic Novel: The Clashes. © Author, 2020

57

Megahed

58

59

Storying Practiceopolis

well as in its ability to exaggerate reality and push narratives to the extremity of fantasy—grant the researcher a temporary authority to cast aside the constraints held by the architectural discipline and explore other possible logics in order to introduce new conceptions. With the visual capabilities of the cartoon alongside storytelling and fction as methodological devices, the research becomes ready to navigate the constraints of the assumed facts of the present profession within the globalised construction industry, as well as to explore possible fctional logics and assumptions about its future that might be reconsidered.

Megahed

Stories from Practiceopolis The novel is organised around a set of investigations that build upon one another to make the full research

argument. These investigations follow the iterative process of by-design research methods, where each puts forward questions that critically interpret the parameters of the landscape of the architectural profession and its relationship with the wider building industry.12 The novel is divided into three parts: the story of the city of Practiceopolis; the stories of the refurbishment project; and the story of the debate in Practiceopolis Parliament. The frst part features a description of the social, cultural and political structure of the city of Practiceopolis (Figure 3.1). It narrates key shifts in the canonical (Western) history of architecture through a story of a historical power struggle between the protagonists of diferent cultures of architectural practice and shows how this development resulted in formulating contemporary Practiceopolis.

3.5 Excerpts from the Graphic Novel: The Debate. © Author, 2020

60

political public debate around the future of the architectural profession within the building industry. Taking inspiration from scientist and novelist Charles Percy (C.P.) Snow’s The Two Cultures: and a Second Look (1969) and its subsequent debates and criticisms, the novel turns this value-confict into an extreme debate that polarises and caricatures the diferent worldviews between those actors as the thesis and antithesis of a dialectical discourse.13 Dialectic discourse is employed as a device for illustrating the divergent positions of the multiple actors of the industry, their opposing value assumptions, and the underlying politics behind their actions. The novel concludes—in the tradition of dystopian worlds common to a certain strand of graphic novels—with a near-future speculation that extrapolates present contemporary conditions to warn against substantial change to the architectural profession. It pessimistically depicts the end of the architectural profession and its reincarnation as a domesticated subsection of one of the technical-rational components of the industry, as a warning against the subsumption of the distinctive values of the architectural profession under those of the building industry.

Storying Practiceopolis

The second part of the novel delves in detail into the case-study building (named the Atkinson building in the novel) as one of the signifcant buildings in Practiceopolis. This part illustrates the design proposal and negotiations, before dramatising some of the clashes that occurred amongst the diferent members of the design and construction team during the project’s development (Figure 3.2). These clashes are presented as part of the everyday life of the imaginary city. The stories feature anecdotes about technical issues with engineering consultants and the manufacturer, about maintenance and warranty issues, as well as conficts around design decisions, among many others. Each of these anecdotes presents what may seem like a trivial situation in practice, yet they nevertheless show the contrasting points of view that in turn refect the varying priorities of each member of the project’s team (Figures 3.3, 3.4). The stories of the Atkinson building are narrated by means of illustration, showing in detail the design proposal, its development, and the conficts that occurred. Each story ends with a commentary on the priorities of those actors and how these priorities are an outcome of certain ideologies and frames of reference about building construction that those actors originally adopted, and which later led to such conficts. The concluding part of the novel displays the climactic confrontation between the diferent ideologies represented in the project (Figure 3.5). This part depicts the value-confict between the architectural profession and other members of the construction industry as a

Three conclusions The stories of Practiceopolis represent, interpret and dramatise what can be characterised as disputes and opposing worldviews manifest within the contemporary building industry. Through these stories, we can explore relationships, worldviews, and attitudes, as well as capture moments in architectural practice that often go unnoticed. The novel has

61

Megahed

62

allowed for the examination of diferent worldviews and for extreme questions about their embedded values to be posed. It has allowed for the interrogation of practice both refexively and refectively for the sake of extracting wider lessons towards the self-defnition of the architectural profession and its role in the building industry. The graphic novel presents an example of the unconventional methods that research by design in architecture, that creative practice inquiry can ofer. As a research tool, the novel has allowed access to the irreducible complexity of architectural practical knowledge that is often bypassed in traditional architectural research. It, too, has enabled the use of the process of inquiry that architects tend to develop when dealing with problems in practice, such as their unique toolbox of sketching, visual diagramming, and mapping to broadcast these processes from the realm of practice to a wider academic audience. As a methodological device, the novel has made possible the documentation, projection and materialisation of the value-conficts present within the building production process. It thus ofers a new path for communicating practice-based research in architecture and for tearing down some of the barriers that prevent such research from being accessible and transferable.

1. Kristina Niedderer and Seymour Roworth-Stokes, ‘The Role and Use of Creative Practice in Research and Its Contribution to Knowledge’, 2nd IASDR International Conference, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 15 November 2007, pp. 1–18 (p. 1) [accessed 24 June 2021]; Yasser Megahed, ‘On Research by Design’, arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, 21.4 (2017), 338–43 (p. 338) . 2. Linda Candy, ‘Practice Based Research: A Guide’, in CCS Report: 2006–V1.0 November (Sydney: Creativity and Cognition Studios, University of Technology, 2006), pp. 1–19 (p. 2). 3. Douglas Murphy, Last Futures: Nature, Technology and the End of Architecture (New York: Verso Books, 2016), p. 81; Ian Brinkley, ‘Entrepreneurialism’, in Practice Futures: Risk, Entrepreneurialism, Practice and the Professional Institute (London: RIBA Building Futures, 2010), pp. 7–10 (p. 7); Yasser Megahed, ‘On “Normative” Architecture: Notes on the Domination of the Technical-rational Mode of Thinking on Mainstream Architectural Production—A Historical Highlight’, Materia Arquitectura, 19 (2021), 98–103. 4. Rem Koolhaas and Hal Foster, Junkspace with Running Room (London: Notting Hill Editions, 2013; repr. New York: New York Review of Books, 2016), p. 42; Mhairi McVicar, ‘“God is in the Details/The Detail is Moot”: A Meeting between

in: Selected Essays by Robert Gutman (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010). 6. Jeremy Till, ‘Architecture and Contingency’, Field, 1.1 (2008), 120–35; Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013); Flora Samuel, ‘Extension stories’, in Reading Architecture and Culture, pp. 96–105; Flora Samuel, Why Architects Matter: Evidencing and Communicating the Value of Architects (London: Routledge, 2018). 7. Donald Schön, The Refective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1982; repr. London: Routledge, 2017), p. 100. 8. Yasser Megahed, Practiceopolis: Stories from the Architectural Profession (London: Routledge, 2020). 9. Julian Bleecker, ‘Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction’, Near Future Laboratory, 29 (2009), [unpag.] (p. 6). 10. Simon Grand, ‘Research as Design: Promising Strategies and Possible Futures’, in Mapping Design Research: Positions and Perspectives, ed. by Simon Grand and Wolfgang Jonas (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2011), pp. 155–75 (p. 168). 11. Marco Frascari, ‘An Architectural Good-Life can be Built, Explained and Taught only through Storytelling’, in Reading Architecture and Culture, pp. 224–34 (p. 225) 12. Yasser Megahed, ‘On Research by Design’, p. 340. 13. Charles Percy Snow, The Two Cultures: and a Second Look (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959; repr. 1969).

Storying Practiceopolis

Mies and Koolhaas’, in Reading Architecture and Culture: Researching Buildings, Spaces, and Documents, ed. by Adam Sharr (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 165–78 (p. 166). 5. Rem Koolhaas, et al., Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large: Ofce for Metropolitan Architecture, Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995); Rem Koolhaas, ‘Junkspace’, October, 100 (2002), 175–90 ; Koolhaas and Foster, Junkspace with Running Room; Leslie Sklair, ‘Iconic Architecture and Capitalist Globalization’, City, 10.1 (2006), 21–47 ; Leslie Sklair, ‘Iconic Architecture and the Cultureideology of Consumerism’, Theory, Culture and Society, 27.5 (2010), 135–59 ; Leslie Sklair, ‘Iconic Architecture in Globalizing Cities’, International Critical Thought, 2.3 (2012), 349–61 ; Leslie Sklair, The Icon Project: Architecture, Cities, and Capitalist Globalization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Robert Gutman, Architectural Practice: A Critical View (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988); Dana Cuf and Russell Ellis, Architects’ People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Dana Cuf, Architecture: The Story of Practice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Dana Cuf and John Wriedt (eds.), Architecture from the Outside

63

Connolly

Ofce practices

Into the void: drawing-out the default space of the suspended ceiling Kieran Connolly

64

Surveying the ceiling

Suspended ceilings are a ubiquitous feature of contemporary built environments: a practical, efcient, and cheap solution for creating a ceiling surface that simultaneously hosts and conceals a variety of environmental and building services. Manufactured and installed on a global scale by large multi-national building product manufacturers, suspended ceilings are typically associated with generic ‘tile-by-the-mile’ open-plan ofces or heavily-serviced spaces like the concourses of super-sized shopping centres. In this chapter I refect upon a series of suspended ceiling installations encountered during a site survey of a historic university building, undertaken as part of my practice work. Observations taken during the survey, alongside a set of measured drawings produced as visual records of these observations, are discussed as a creative practice aiding a wider cultural inquiry into the suspended ceiling as a default element of architectural design. Importantly, the drawings described are framed as refexive compositions that helped to draw-out the default spaces of the suspended ceilings surveyed.

The beginnings of this inquiry were feshed-out during a routine site visit to the Grade II listed Armstrong Building, located on the main campus of the Newcastle University estate. A symbolic centre for the University, hosting annual graduation ceremonies alongside a variety of public events, the Armstrong Building was constructed in a series of phases between 1887 and 1906.1 When completed, the building served as a School of Physical Science and was mostly confgured with large teaching laboratories across its four foors. However, as the school expanded from a college of Durham University into a separate academic institution, the function and use of the Armstrong Building changed signifcantly.2 Consequently, the building saw a wave of piecemeal renovation and alteration projects from the 1960s onwards. These works involved carving up the large laboratories into smaller teaching rooms and academic ofces better suited to new uses, the insertion of a new foor on the eastern wing of the building, and the introduction of a palette of materials that covered-up many of the

A series of suspended ceiling installations encountered during my site survey of a historic building form the starting point for my creative practice inquiry. Observations taken during the survey, alongside measured drawings produced as visual records, prompt a wider study into the suspended ceiling as a default element of architectural design. Te drawings are framed as refexive compositions that helped to draw-out what I call the default spaces of the suspended ceilings surveyed.

Into the void

Introduction

65

Connolly

building’s original details, fxtures, and surface fnishes. Only a few months into my doctoral candidature, the site visit formed part of an extensive, fve-phase renovation project of the building overseen by my employer: Design Ofce, a design and research consultancy embedded within the School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape. Surveys conducted for each phase of the renovation works, combined with archived orthographic drawings of the original layout, ofered opportunities to explore the existing condition of the building and search for clues about the building’s history, previous spatial confgurations, and concealed details. Touring the various spaces of the ground foor, a familiar and repeated set of materials were encountered. On the foor was a frayed and heavily worn blue carpet, set out on a repeating grid of square tiles.

4.1 Tired carpets, magnolia walls, and suspended ceilings. © Author, 2014

66

In most rooms, walls were washed with magnolia paint, heavily pock-marked with cable-runs and wiring concealed in messily assembled lengths of uPVC plastic trunking. And, above, a familiar pattern of square tiles could be found set inside an exposed aluminium grid: a suspended ceiling punctuated with recessed light fttings, fre safety equipment, and ventilation grilles (Figure 4.1). Throughout the ground foor, suspended ceilings repeated from room-toroom, one corridor to the next, paying little regard to how they interacted with the existing and historic parts of the building. Original ashlar dressed window frames were cut-of by ceilings to twothirds of their full height, thick masonry columns disappeared beyond ceiling tiles, and ornate details were hastily worked around with little regard to how one material met another. In many instances,

4.2 A messy space of tangled cables within the void. © Author, 2014

of ceiling tiles, held in a lightweight aluminium framework hung from the original ceilings using stalactite-like metal struts that punctured straight into the historic fabric of the building (Figure 4.2). Certain voids proved to be much better illuminated, by natural light admitted through high level windows cut of from the rooms below (Figure 4.3), while in some instances new suspended ceilings had been hung from older variants, in turn hung from even older incarnations. And, in other void spaces, redundant mechanical ventilation equipment had been left in-situ, seemingly easier to leave concealed by a suspended ceiling to avoid a time-consuming and potentially costly process of removal. The suspended ceilings in the Armstrong Building, it seemed, were useful ways of concealing things that needed to be unseen, from electrical cables to ventilation ductwork, plumbing

Into the void

ceiling tiles were broken or stained brown from water damage, whilst the modular artifcial lighting units integrated into the ceiling grids emitted a dull yellow glow that did little to brighten the atmosphere of the rooms. Delving deeper into various spaces, the nature of the survey necessitated a closer inspection of the suspended ceiling installations, as well as a closer look into the hidden space above them—the service voids sealed of from the room below behind the repetitive grids of sound absorbing mineral fbre tiles. Easy to dislodge to ensure straightforward access to the concealed spaces above, peering into the void after a tile had been removed revealed a messy space of tangled cables and concealed details, as well as glimpses of the building’s original ‘true’ ceilings. Exposed timber beams, barrel vaulted structures, cornices, and dentil courses had all been lost behind a thin veil

4.3 A well-lit void, illuminated by high-level windows cut-of from the room below by a suspended ceiling. © Author, 2014

67

infrastructure to former installations deemed no longer ft for purpose.

Connolly

68

Ceilings by default Following the site visit, I was keen to locate more information about the suspended ceiling installations encountered at the Armstrong Building. Ceilings of this type—exposed grid with lay-in acoustic tiles, interchangeable with strategically-placed light fttings, ventilation outlets, and other service conduits—were a common feature in numerous spaces on our university campus. An identical ceiling hovered above me in my ofce. An identical installation could be found in practically every lecture theatre on campus. And an identical system foated across the University’s main cafeteria. The suspended ceilings at the Armstrong Building, then, were not unique to the building. Rather, each installation represented an individual manifestation of a universally applicable system of various parts that had been specifed, procured, and installed across the campus. However, detailed visual information about these uniformly applied installations, describing their design and placement in specifc rooms and specifc buildings, was limited. For instance, the most up-to-date measured drawings of the Armstrong Building held by the University’s Estate Support Service (ESS), an in-house facility management department, provided no detail on the suspended ceilings. Similarly, a three-dimensional digital model of the building produced to aid the renovation works ofered only a little more insight, confrming the presence of suspended

ceilings in many spaces but inaccurately modelling them in digital space using a non-representative blank surface texture and a notional material thickness. The only trace of information about the suspended ceilings installed across the Armstrong Building, and across the whole campus, was outlined in a written material specifcation drafted by the ESS department. Outlined in the document was a list of preferred construction materials that, unless instructed otherwise by ESS, were to be installed in all refurbishment and development projects throughout the University estate. The list included details regarding acceptable fooring materials, suitable door fxtures, appropriate light fttings, and, importantly, desirable ceiling fnishes. As detailed in the specifcation, the preferred ceiling fnish for campus buildings was an exposed grid and lay-in tile suspended ceiling system, matching those encountered at the Armstrong Building. The specifcation also dictated further preferences, including a desired application of systems set-out on a 600mm-by-600mm module, as well as the selection of ceiling tiles manufactured and supplied by a building product manufacturer coincidentally named Armstrong® World Industries Incorporated.3 On their company website, Armstrong® describe themselves as a ‘leader in the design and manufacture of innovative commercial and residential ceiling, wall and suspension system solutions’, ofering a variety of applications, ‘at home, at work, in healthcare facilities, in 4.4 Survey drawing 1: the room below and the void above. © Author, 2014

69

Into the void

Connolly

classrooms, stores, or restaurants.’4 These suspended ceiling ‘solutions’, Armstrong® claim, ‘help to enhance comfort, save time, improve building efciency and overall performance, and create beautiful spaces.’5 Notwithstanding contestable claims regarding their aesthetics, the intrinsic value of the frm’s proprietary ceiling systems appears to be their ability to be installed everywhere—an all-encompassing panacea bringing together a variety of building services into a single system of construction using standardised mass-produced components sold under multi-year warranties as guarantees of material quality. The suspended ceilings at the Armstrong Building were then, it seemed, installed by default: they were a straightforward answer to a range of design and facilities management problems, helpfully underwritten by a globally-operating building product manufacturer. Their specifcation was understood as limiting risk to client, designer, and contractor alike. Drawing-out default space Refecting upon the observations made during my site survey, the details outlined in the ESS department’s material specifcation, and the information found on the Armstrong® corporate website, I produced a series of measured drawings that attempted to capture and refect upon the default characteristics of the Armstrong Building’s suspended ceiling installations. These drawings sought to ofer closer readings of them, describing their individual components and overall assembly, the room below as well as the void space above, along with the tangled

70

web of cables and concealed historic fabric. Importantly, the drawings were also constructed as a more faithful description of the suspended ceiling installations as found, following what architectural theorist Adam Sharr has described as a practice of ‘drawing in good faith.’6 Typically, drawn representations of suspended ceilings, along with the building services they conceal, are presented only in plan view, using a type of drawing commonly referred to as the ‘refected ceiling plan.’7 Refected ceiling plans describe the proposed ceiling fnish from above as if it were projected onto a mirrored plane on the foor plan below. Using a coded language of icons and symbols, these types of ‘installation drawing’ graphically communicate the schematic layout of the ceiling fnish and integrated building services, from the placement of the suspension grid to the arrangement of ventilation ductwork. As presented, refected ceiling plans give the impression of an orderly and controlled distribution of environmental infrastructure. However, as the concealed void spaces of the Armstrong Building revealed, the real condition of these service zones is frequently anything but orderly and controlled. A conventional refected ceiling plan would, therefore, be an unfaithful representation of the observations made during the site visit, a drawing ‘burdened by a coding that serves to exclude.’8 With faithful intent, illustrated throughout this chapter are three measured drawings (Figures 4.4–4.6) that 4.5 Survey drawing 2: from below, looking up. © Author, 2016

71

Into the void

Connolly

72

attempt a more accurate, less diagramand tangled web of building services matic description of three suspended ceil- observed after the void had been opened ing installations surveyed. These drawings up, along the same cut line, showing what still follow established drawing convenis typically omitted in architectural section tions, using techniques of scaled and drawings. The two section drawings, measured orthographic projection in plan, above and below, indicate the thin veil of section, and elevation. They are also proceiling tiles and light fttings held within duced using conventional CAD software, the lightweight aluminium grid, parasititaking advantage of the 1:1 drafting space cally hung from the original barrel-vaulted that permits the close drawing of small timber ceiling structure, describing the details and irregular shapes that would suspended ceiling’s functional disposition be difcult to draw by hand. However, the as a host and concealer of a variety of information presented in each drawing building services. More accurate than a goes beyond usual assumptions made schematic refected ceiling plan, these in graphically coded descriptions of paired section drawings are also more ceiling installations. Instead, the imperfaithful illustrations of the suspended fections and messiness of the Armstrong ceiling as mediator, recalling architecBuilding’s suspended ceilings and the tural critic Reyner Banham’s seminal service voids they conceal are recorded description of the suspended ceiling as a as found. Moreover, the drawings seek to ‘multi-purpose membrane of concealed draw-out the default dispositions of the power.’9 suspended ceiling, communicating the The second drawing (Figure 4.5) cultures, values, methods, and actions that focuses more closely on the ceiling ensure their universal application across module and its arrangement in a series of the University estate—important and small rooms carved out of what was once intrinsic qualities that would otherwise a much larger common room. Difering be missed out from standard measured from a conventional refected ceiling drawings of the ceiling weighed down by plan, the drawing presents a view of the codifed convention. ceiling plane from below looking up as The frst drawing presented (Figure if the viewer were lying on the foor. This 4.4) explores the relationship between the permits a more accurate depiction of the suspended ceiling, the inhabited room ceiling surface, an elevational view of the below, and the unoccupied service void exposed suspension grid, acoustic ceiling above. Constructed as a 2D section, the tiles, and outlets from integrated building drawing depicts the room as surveyed in services. The drawing also describes the two parts. At the base of the drawing, the universality of the Armstrong® ceiling inhabited room is described, sealed from system specifed. Whilst each installation above by the grid and tiles of the propriein each room employs the same standard tary Armstrong® suspended ceiling system. Above this, a further detached sectional 4.6 Survey drawing 3: a tectonics of speed. © Author, 2017 representation depicts the chaotic mess

73

Connolly

74

parts dimensionally co-ordinated on a 600mm-by-600mm module, following criteria outlined in the ESS departments material specifcation, no single installation is seen to be identical to another. Informed by the unique shape and dimensions of the rooms where they were installed, each suspended ceiling conforms to its own organising grid, set-out from the centre of the room to ensure the most efcient use of materials. As individual fragments of a universal system of construction, the drawing describes the malleability of proprietary suspended ceiling systems, refecting their capability to be cut-and-pasted into practically any room regardless of shape, form, and size. Finally, the third drawing described in this chapter (Figure 4.6) explores the tectonics of suspended ceilings and the ‘art’ of their construction. Within Western architectural culture, the term tectonics typically invokes ideas of permanence, craft, and authenticity: a way of designing and building that takes time. Suspended ceilings would appear antithetical to this dominant defnition, frequently understood as an inauthentic, impermanent construction system usually installed at speed. Refecting these speedy characteristics, the fnal survey drawing speculates and imagines a scene from the installation of the proprietary suspended ceiling systems retroftted into the Armstrong Building. Constructed as a more closely scaled sectional view of the Armstrong® ceiling system, the drawing depicts the simple mechanisms used to hook together the aluminium framework without the aid of mechanical or secondary fxings.

Furthermore, the drawing attempts a more faithful visual description of the installation process usually only described in written method statements buried within legally-binding performance specifcations. In doing so, the drawing seeks to re-draw the authenticity of the proprietary suspended ceiling as a precisely crafted system of construction, shaped by a diferent kind of tectonic culture that prioritises economically efcient design and a speedy process of installation. A creative cultural inquiry In each of the drawings presented and discussed in this chapter, I have sought through my creative practice to drawout a propositional line of inquiry into the material and cultural history of the suspended ceiling, and to interpret the suspended ceiling as a default element of architectural design. Functionally sound, universally applicable and fast to install, the suspended ceiling installations surveyed at the Armstrong Building lay bare their default dispositions. In doing so, the measured drawings illustrated in this chapter demonstrate the value of creative practice as a method to draw-out lines of inquiry that may otherwise be difcult to describe and interpret. Through more faithful drawn descriptions of Armstrong® ceilings at the Armstrong Building, an inquiry into the architectural and cultural dimensions of the suspended ceiling is reinforced through a critical and refexive creative practice of measured drawing.

Into the void

1. For a more detailed account of the history and architecture of the Armstrong Building, as well as a broader history of the development of the Newcastle University estate, see Nikolaus Pevsner and Ian Richmond, The Buildings of England: Northumberland, 2nd edn, rev. by John Grundy, Grace McCombie, Peter Ryder, and Humphrey Welfare (London: Penguin, 1992; repr. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 448–53. 2. In 1963, King’s College Newcastle broke away from its afliation to Durham University to form a new higher education institution: Newcastle University. 3. Further research revealed no link between Armstrong® and the patron of the Armstrong Building, William George Armstrong, an infuential Newcastle-based Victorian industrialist and arms dealer. 4. [n.a.], ‘About Armstrong World Industries’, [n.d] [accessed 24 August 2020]. 5. Ibid. 6. See: Adam Sharr, ‘Drawing in Good Faith’, Architectural Theory Review, 14.3 (2009), 306–21 . 7. It is worth noting here that, whilst more recent advancements in Building Information Modelling (BIM) claim to ofer greater threedimensional understanding of existing and proposed buildings, many models still tend toward a simplifed illustration of suspended

ceilings and building services, as evidenced by the non-representative ceiling surfaces described in the pre-renovation BIM model of the Armstrong Building. 8. Sharr, ‘Drawing in Good Faith’, p. 319. 9. Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the WellTempered Environment, 2nd edn (London: Architectural Press; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969; repr. 1984), p. 212.

75

Longfeld

Ofce practices

Amateur adaptions James Longfeld

76

In June 2011 tenants of the Byker estate in Newcastle upon Tyne voted to transfer the ownership and responsibility for the management of the estate from the local City Council to a newly formed Community Land Trust—the Byker Community Trust (BCT). In the lead up to the vote, the BCT’s formation was envisioned as a way of enabling residents to have a direct role in the running of the estate. The promotional slogan ‘Byker for Byker people’ echoed empowering sentiments used to promote the wholesale redevelopment of the area undertaken during the 1970s and the participatory approaches adopted by Anglo-Swedish architect Ralph Erskine and his team throughout this process. The importance of these methods contributed to the redevelopment being granted Grade II* heritage listing in 2007, in recognition of both its innovative urban plan and the ‘pioneering model’ of public participation that contributed to its realisation.1 Accordingly, Byker ofers a site of refection from which to explore shifting perspectives on the role of participation, and to negotiate commonplace

distinctions between ‘experts’ and ‘users’ in the development of architecture. Though progressive for its time, many of the participatory methods adopted by Erskine and his colleagues ofer little new today. However, the position of many members of the team, situated on site as residents, suggests potential to re-frame the focus of participatory practice, and in doing so respond to contemporary critiques of participation within architecture. In this chapter I will outline my own contemporary situated practice in Byker, pursued having taken up residence there in 2011, which was predicated on a renewed ‘invitation’ by the BCT for residents to participate. While approaches to participation typically consider the practitioner as the initiator or enabler of the participation of non-experts in the operations of architectural practice, my practice suggests the possibility of a contrasting, yet complimentary, mode of participation—that of the ‘expert’ participating in the social ecologies and political structures of their place of residence as an engaged citizen—with a radically reconfgured approach to practice.

My architectural activities fnd their expression through the multiple subject positions and identities that I have engaged with—as a resident, hobbyist, maker, activist, and creative citizen in Byker. Embedded in the social rituals and rhythms of everyday activities, my situated practices constitute a form creative citizenship whereby spatial production can be seen as a nonhierarchical and co-operative venture for the appropriation of the formally constituted city.

Amateur adaptions

Byker, for Byker people

77

The 1970s revisited

Longfeld

78

people.4 Similarly, Tony Hills—Community Development Ofcer during the redevelErskine’s was one voice amongst many opment—recognised the sensitivity with that emerged in the 1960s criticising which the process was undertaken but the perceived hegemony of modernist stated that it did constitute ‘participation’.5 architects, which provided the impetus This problem was experienced more for new participatory approaches to be broadly across this ‘community architecdeployed during the 1970s. In a 1969 paper titled ‘Architecture’s Public’, architect ture’ movement, which failed to maintain traction in infuencing the conventions Giancarlo de Carlo identifed a need to of architectural practice, leading thenreconsider the relationship between the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) practice of experts, who held a dominant President Max Hutchinson to dismiss it as position in the production of architecture ‘a PR exercise masquerading as a crusade’, and the built environment, and the users in 1989.6 Refecting on this period, archiof architecture who were considered to tectural and urban design historian and be passive consumers of architectural theorist Margaret Crawford proposes that production. Instead, De Carlo argued that the radical transformation in relations the activities of users should be considered as agents of architectural production between architect and user that was pursued during the 1970s served only to in their own right.2 At Byker, Erskine stated his intention reduce architects’ agency to engage with to create a situation where the community the social and physical concerns of users.7 was able to express its needs, desires, and Over the past ten years there has feelings as a part of the planning process, been a growing body of literature articarguing that: ulating the need to revive the engaged spirit of Erskine and his contemporaries, It is not enough that people are informed of to imbue architecture with social and our plans and given the chance to respond political agency,8 and enable the user in to them. It should be a much more fundaspatial production.9 Social architecture, mental participation, in which the commualternative architectural practice, socially nity [...] can express its needs, desires and engaged architecture,10 and spatial agency—the latter term coined by archifeelings as a positive stage in the planning process, and observe that their thought and tect and theorist Jeremy Till and others in their survey of this form of practice—are articulation leads to real and meaningful all terms that have been used to capture changes in the plans, participation must be the essence of a particular mode of real—not symbolic.3 architectural production.11 However, as argued by housing policy Despite this call, whilst participation theorist Peter Malpass in his review of is ostensibly ubiquitous in the planning the project at Byker, participation was process with its requisite ‘statements of limited as there was no transfer of power community involvement’, it has recently from institutional decision makers to local been observed by architect Markus

A central issue is identifed by Till in his paper ‘The Negotiation of Hope’ (2005), where he argues that much of what passes for participation in architecture is placatory pseudo-participation that enables a pre-determined outcome to pass unscathed by public opinion, thus failing to empower citizens to take part in the production of the built environment.14 In response, Till proposes that for participation to break-out of the user-expert dialectic, architects need to take up the role of citizen-expert/expert-citizen and embrace ‘potentially transformative’ localised forms of knowledge. The Byker Street irregulars As residents, the professional commitments of Erskine’s team were supplemented by a series of informal spatial activities deployed in response to the social and physical realities of occupation and inhabitation. Drawing inspiration from these operations as a touchstone, situated on site as resident, my subsequent practices have built on architectural theorist Jane Rendell’s exploration of the relationship between position, knowledge, and spatial production that opens up the possibility of drawing multiple subject positions into

the operation of architectural activities.15 Here, the situated locations of intersecting identities inform the emergence of place-based knowledge and actions and provide the context for a diversifed range of spatial practices that are marginal, incidental, contingent, and provisional. Accordingly, my creative engagement with the site of Byker—including situated drawing, self-build construction, speculative design, and self-publishing—both enables critical refection on the operation of architectural practitioners and traces a reconfgured mode of practice deployed in the context of my participation in the everyday experience of Byker. An architectural hobby These diversifed practices have focussed particularly on the condition of the multiple ‘hobby rooms’ dotted across the Byker redevelopment, through concurrent design interventions and ongoing discussions with the BCT regarding their occupation and operation. Designed as a form of shared micro semi-public space for social leisure activity, the hobby rooms were informed by Erskine’s experience of shared spaces in Sweden, the communality of which he felt could be realised in the close-knit working-class community of Byker that the redevelopment was intended to maintain. Although once busy with diverse activity, the majority of these hobby rooms presently lie un-used, vacant, or derelict, a casualty of distant management and a culture unused to the ambiguities of informal co-ownership.16 Shortly after moving to Byker, I applied for access to a hobby room and was informed of the BCT’s plans to

Amateur adaptions

Miessen and political theorist Chantal Moufe that current ideas of participation, and corresponding practices, are often aligned with an agenda of acquiescence, operating only as a symbolic gesture.12 Similarly, architectural theorist Doina Petrescu argues that ‘the problem is […] that the term “participation” is accepted uncritically, idealised and centred on concepts of consensus’.13

79

reassess these spaces with an intention to invest money in their refurbishment; however, early attempts to participate in this process were frustrated. The BCT expressed a clear reluctance to take any active and exploratory steps with residents, prior to formation of a centrally defned strategy. This initial set-back led me to shift my attention away from the hobby rooms

The spatial practices of six specifc hobbies were then surveyed through flm and a set of measured drawings that traced the relations between the creative practices of each hobbyist and the spaces they occupied. The drawings shift the perception of hobby space from activity defned by rooms, to space temporally inhabited, structured by the furniture and equipment deployed by the hobbyists,

as physical spaces and instead to begin to consider what constituted ‘room for hobbies’. This was explored frstly by mapping contemporary hobby practices across Byker, revealing a stimulating range of activities including: dressmaking, amateur radio productions, music recording, photography, painting, bird watching, fshing, and making musical instruments.

and mobilised by their time and practice-based rituals. This observation led to the design of a series of hobby-specifc pieces of furniture for particular residents and groups that provide a means to appropriate public and private spaces within the redevelopment for hobby practices, including the hobby rooms should they become

Longfeld 5.1 Mapping the spatial operation of a resident who makes her own clothes. © Author, 2014

80

Amateur adaptions

5.2 A range of designs for mobile furniture each designed with a specifc hobby activity in mind. © Author, 2013

5.4 The ‘flm Dalek’ in use at a local flm night. © Author, 2016

5.3 The ‘flm Dalek’ supports a mobile cinema. © Author, 2016

5.5 Recently repaired fencing and bin-stores. © Author, 2014

81

BYKER COMMUNITY GARDENS Afliations

Ouseburn Farm

Residents

Byker Community Gardens

YMCA Byker

Storehouse

Horticulturalist

Byker Community Trust

Locations

Activities

Education

Productive Growing

Horticultural Training

Tending Public Spaces

Community Orchard

Community Meals

Cooking Lessons

Longfeld

5.6 Imagining appropriation potentially supported by a mobile potting shed built for a gardening group. © Author, 2016

Byker Aspire Byker Community Trust Ouseburn Farm

S

ITIE

IV ACT

BCT Rapid Response Team

HORTICULTURAL TRAINING

COMMUNITY ORCHARD

TENDING PUBLIC SPACES

MUNITY G AR OM RC

NS DE

PLANT NURSERY

Horticulturalist

Residents COMMUNITY MEALS

BY KE EDUCATION

COOKING LESSONS

PRODUCTIVE GROWING

Residents

St Lawrence’s Primary School YMCA Byker

Storehouse

5.7 Visualising productive agencies built around shared hobby interests, in this case gardening. © Author, 2016

82

their construction and ongoing use. The diagrams reveal that these elements exist not simply as aesthetic or formal objects, but as active nodes within local networks, supportive of existing social relations and generative of new forms of social organisation. Thus, they incur their value through this social capital, catalysing expertise and activity, but contingent on the fuctuating interests and availability of residents. This refection led to a set of proposals based around these furniture elements for the expansion of their interest-driven hobby practices into collaborative agencies, involving residents and local organisations, shifting these rich, yet marginal, practices into a position of legitimacy. These drawings explore relationships that will enable the social infrastructure necessary to appropriate the hobby rooms. Accordingly, the proposals visualise spatial possibilities, while revealing possible collaborative social relations between residents and local agencies. Throughout these tactical operations, on-going discussions with the BCT made it increasingly apparent that their perception of participation difers to the vision put forward by Erskine and pursued by my own temporal practices. Instead, it seems to draw from a form of metrics-testing and opinion-sourcing, popularised in the UK under New Labour that uses the rhetoric of customer service, where residents are encouraged to express their views to enable the BCT to deliver the service they desire. In this way, residents are treated as consumers rather than active agents, an approach typifed by infamous ‘you asked for and we gave you’ matrices.

Amateur adaptions

available in the future. The designs for these pieces draw from the distinct materiality of Byker with Erskine’s ofce’s various softwood joinery details. Though these furniture elements were produced formally, they maintain a DIY aesthetic that ‘invites the amateur builder to add’.17 Though some designs are for fxed elements, many are designed to be mobile, sidestepping issues of planning, with its requisite expertise, and the inaccessibility of the hobby rooms to give residents the opportunity to test ideas for introducing new activities to un-used spaces in the area. The designs also ofer a pattern book of detailing to respond to the conditions of the heritage listing that threatens to cement an ‘authorised’ aesthetic, reversing residents’ interventions and restricting their agency to realise physical alterations that respond to changing social conditions and patterns of life. The furniture artefacts present a model for residents to exploit Byker’s material potential, whilst visualising and critiquing the bureaucratic structures of heritage and management that restrict intervention, reclaiming Byker’s unique materiality for the productive DIY practices from which they appear to derive. Six designs were realised, through my own hobby practice of timber joinery, supported by other residents who contributed to the process, enabling me to operate as designer, maker, and user, all-the-time establishing a productive loop of amateur making. The lives of the constructed objects were plotted on a series of diagrams to reveal the involvement of a range of residents who have contributed to

83

This was perhaps most evident when I was invited by the BCT to a hobby room consultation session held to elicit responses to ideas drawn up by an external architect. Though described afterwards as a ‘successful’ consultation, it transpired—having read through the BCT’s board meeting minutes—that only ten people turned up (one of them myself ), fewer left feedback and only current hobby room key-holders were invited as opposed to the general populace. To date the only work undertaken on the hobby rooms by the BCT is the conversion of ten units to residential space—more easily suited to revenue generation.

Longfeld

Amateur adaptions Then editor of the Architectural Review, James Richards, argued in 1972 that there was a dangerous gap between the profession of architecture and the public which had led to a widespread mistrust of architects.18 In order to develop within the architect a sense of social responsibility for their locality, and a close relationship between the architect and user, Richards argued for the provision of architectural expertise at a local level, suggesting that ‘architects should ideally live where they practice and take responsibility for the design of their local environment, at the scale of a group of streets’. Richards’ view was that an architect should operate like a GP, echoing architectural historian Andrew Saint’s observation that the architects at Byker ‘acted not just as designers but also as unpaid GPs’.19 However, in such a confguration, the architect continues to operate within the bounds of architecture as a professional

84

practice. In order to establish architecture as a legally protected profession, Till observes that the practices of architecture are conceptualised as bounded, whereas in reality they are open operations, with a sleight of hand implicitly eliding practice and profession to establish a dialect between expert and ‘user’.20 Accordingly, though participatory practices predominantly seek to involve ‘users’ or non-experts in the expert practices of architecture, they also maintain the dialectic, and thus a privileged position for the expert who initiates and frames the terms of engagement and situates these within the bounds of a professionally confgured project. This contrast of open and closed operations refects architect Richard Sennett’s observation of the city being comprised of ‘cité’ and ‘ville’, where the former evokes the lived experience arising through the practice of everyday inhabitation of individuals—a sensory and multi-perceptual reading of place—as opposed to the latter, which refers to the formally constructed city as a series of physical objects and compositions.21 These two versions of the city—overlaid and interlocking yet at the same time divergent with a discordant interface between experienced and constructed space—provide two potential sites of action, and highlight space outside of the formally confgured delivery ‘programme’ of architecture for adaption and innovation of the city through a practice of ‘modest making’ as an active practice of dwelling. Situated by my residency and embedded in the social rituals and rhythms of

as a non-hierarchical and co-operative venture of appropriation of the formally constituted city, undertaken in tandem with other citizens. Architectural theorist Jill Stoner notes that this engagement with spatial production as a shared operation has the power to destabilise the privileged position claimed by the architectural profession: Space is always under construction, in perpetual loops of distributions and contestations within a latticework of human relations and activity. And it’s precisely this complex, cohered fabric within which we must embed ourselves, and thus break the stratifed pyramid that holds the architect/ subject as a stable identity at the top and the user/subject captive at the bottom.22 Deploying hobby as method, inter-related spatial activities constitute a practice of refexive action that is fuid and responsive, operating outside the context of professionally confgured practice—therefore amateur in manner. To release participation from its strictures of consensus making, Miessen encourages practitioners to embrace the role of the ‘uninvited outsider, the non-aligned embedded practitioner.’23

Miessen recognises that the position of the amateur enables them to question received wisdom and established modes of operation, as they operate unencumbered by the agendas and boundaries of expert knowledge.24 My architectural activities fnd their expression through the multiple subject positions and identities that I have engaged with—as a resident, hobbyist, maker, activist, and creative citizen in Byker. In doing so, focus is shifted from architectural participation as an engagement with discreet and professional projects that maintain hierarchical relations, towards the contribution of architectural knowledge within an ongoing cyclical process, framed around successive and complementary spatial actions. Furthermore, through taking up an embedded position within a relational network of residents and agencies, recognition is given to the role of underlying social infrastructures behind spatial forms, identifying and catalysing the social practices that exploit, resist, and shape the conditions of the built environment through inhabitation. Incorporating a focus on the role of activity and relationship through participation in the realm of occupation, catalysed and supported by architectural ways of seeing and thinking, the situated practitioner as a creative citizen is able to contribute to the prioritisation of architecture loosed from the strictures of a time delineated project—one that is spatially and socially situated yet temporally boundless.

Amateur adaptions

everyday activities, my practices adopt the fuid lived experience of the cité as site, giving primacy to my identity as a user, and making use of the creative possibilities ofered by tactics of appropriation, adaption, (mis)use, promotion, management, and maintenance. These situated practices in turn constitute a form of active and creative citizenship whereby spatial production can be seen

85

Longfeld

86

1. Sarah Glynn, ‘Good Homes: Lessons in Public Housing From Newcastle’s Byker Estate’, in Byker, Newcastle upon Tyne: In Standard Colour, by Sarah Glynn and Keith Collie (Herne Bay: Categorical Books, 2015), p. 8. 2. Giancarlo De Carlo, ‘Architecture’s Public’, in Architecture and Participation, ed. by Peter Blundell Jones, Doina Petrescu, and Jeremy Till (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 3–22. 3. Ralph Erskine, ‘Participating in Byker’, in Architecture: Opportunities, Achievements, ed. by Barbara Goldstein (London: RIBA Publications, 1977), pp. 74–76 (p. 74). 4. Peter Malpass, ‘A Reappraisal of Byker. Part 2: Magic, Myth and the Architect’, The Architects’ Journal, 169.20 (1979), 1011–21. 5. Tony Hills, The Social Consequences of Redevelopment (Newcastle: Newcastle City Council, 1974). 6. Paul Jenkins, Joanne Milner, and Tim Sharpe, ‘A Brief Historical Review of Community Technical Aid and Community Architecture’, in Architecture, Participation and Society, ed by Paul Jenkins and Leslie Forsythe (Oxon: Routledge, 2010), pp. 23–38 (p. 37). 7. Margaret Crawford, ‘Can Architects be Socially Responsible’, in Out of Site: A Social Criticism of Architecture, ed. by Diane Ghirardo (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), pp. 27–45 (p. 39). 8. José L. S. Gámez and Susan Rogers, ‘Introduction: An Architecture of Change’, in

Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism, ed. by Bryan Bell and Katie Wakeford (New York: Metropolis Books, 2008), pp. 18–25. 9. Lee Stickells, ‘Editorial—The Right to the City: Rethinking Architecture’s Social Signifcance’, Architectural Theory Review, 16.3 (2011), 213–27. 10. Paul Jones and Kenton Card, ‘Constructing “Social Architecture”: The Politics of Representing Practice’, Architectural Theory Review, 16.3 (2011), 228–44. 11. Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Hill, Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture (London: Routledge, 2011). 12. Nicholas Hirsch and Markus Miessen (eds.), The Space of Agonism: Markus Miessen in Conversation with Chantal Moufe, Critical Spatial Practice 2 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), pp. 16–26. 13. Doina Petrescu, ‘How to make a community as well as the space for it’, in Space Shuttle: Six Projects of Urban Creativity and Social Interaction, Belfast, ed. by Peter Mutschler and Ruth Morrow (Belfast: PS2, 2007), pp. 45–50 (p. 47). 14. Jeremy Till, ‘The Negotiation of Hope’, in Architecture and Participation, ed. by Peter Blundell Jones, Doina Petrescu, and Jeremy Till (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 23–42 (p. 33). 15. Jane Rendell, ‘Architectural Research and Disciplinarity’, arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, 8.2 (2004), 141–47 (p. 142) .

16. James Longfeld, ‘Hobby Room’, MONU: Small Urbanism, 27 (2017), 90–96. 17. David Dunster, ‘Walled Town’, Progressive Architecture (August 1979), 68–73 (p. 70). 18. James Richards, ‘The Hollow Victory: 1932–72’, RIBA Journal, 80 (1972), 192–97 (p. 196). 19. Andrew Saint, ‘The Byker Street Irregulars’, New Statesman, 93.4209 (1977), 687. 20. Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), pp. 154, 161. 21. Richard Sennett, Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City (London: Penguin, 2018), pp. 1–3. 22. Jill Stoner, Towards a Minor Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), p. 75. 23. Markus Miessen, Crossbenching: Toward Participation as Critical Spatial Practice (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), p. 64. 24. Markus Miessen, The Nightmare of Participation: Crossbench Praxis as a Mode of Criticality (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010), pp. 191–93.

Place-based practices

Place-based practices 87

Clark

Place-based practices

Being in-between: a multi-sited ethnography of retirement housing Sam Clark

88

Architects are also located in-between the clients who commission and the contractors who construct their projects, as well as other consultants in the building industry, end-users, stakeholders, publics, and statutory authorities. Historically, the architect fulflled a central role, leading integrated design teams and coordinating schemes, but increasing technological, social, and cultural complexity has made it more difcult.2 Today, design teams might

include an array of professional consultants, including architects, structural engineers, services engineers, landscape architects and so on, as well as specialist subcontractors or installers with design responsibilities. There is thus a continuing necessity for architects to be located in-between a range of actors afected by and/or invested in their design projects. Research context I recount here my creative practice inquiry exploring the major societal challenge of housing a ‘super-aged’3 UK population, and the particular needs and aspirations of ‘active third agers’.4 The research was sponsored by a UK national property developer, referred to here as Pink & Knight,5 who ofer what they describe as a retirement-living product, reputedly ‘driven by need rather than aspiration’.6 The thesis presented and interpreted the stories of nine actors involved in the design, construction, management, and inhabitation of third-age housing in the UK, including Pink & Knight’s product.7 It integrated original storytelling with architectural survey, analysis, and design techniques to bring together the social

I refect upon my research exploring the major societal challenge of housing a ‘super-aged’ population in the UK, and the particular needs and aspirations of ‘active third agers’. My chapter thus ofers an auto-ethnographic account—part confessional narrative and part refective record of a creative practitioner inquiry—that adopted a distinctive research positionality ‘in-between’ a variety of felds, sites, and settings.

Being in-between

Being in-between is a familiar position for architectural researchers whose work is typically situated within a fuid disciplinary feld. It is perhaps particularly felt by those with professional backgrounds, or vocational training, who are seeking to maintain an allegiance with, or sense of connection to, the applied feld through forms of creative practice inquiry. It could equally be reasoned that the condition of being in-between is an innate one for architectural practitioners, in their being fguratively in-between diferent roles and/or perceptions of an architect— ranging from the architect as professional or service provider, as artist, as consultant with specialist or technical expertise, or as entrepreneur.1

89

science practice of participant observation with architectural post-occupancy evaluation. The research foregrounded ‘designerly’8 modes of inquiry, resulting in design-relevant feedback for those involved in the production of retirement-living environments. A diverse range of tactics were used, including short residencies at retirement developments, staying overnight and engaging in the social life of the shared lounge, as well as recording show-and-tell home visits, contingent on the hospitality of informants. Altogether, the research stories constitute a ‘multi-sited ethnographic’ study,9 with each story presenting the position of an actor encountered within the research sites/settings.

Research stories Refecting on the research design, the range of actors was critical, for each actor brought their individual voice to the ensemble. Range was achieved through consideration of status/position (‘director’, ‘owner’, and so on) and site/setting (academy, ofce, and diferent home environments). Consideration was also given to each actor’s relationship to the research/researcher—ranging from close friends and family members to distant others that only became known through the research project. Figure 6.1 places the actor types within a matrix, with axes close-distant and low-high representing the quality and frequency of interactions respectively. Similarly, consideration was given to the actor’s relative proximity to the research sponsor and their product,

Clark 7 Vulnerable Friend

6 Architecture Student

2 Developer Director

8 Baby Boomers 1 Creative Practitioner 4 Company Architect 3 Resident Owner

5 Scheme Manager

9 Town Planner

6.1 Actor-researcher interactions with the researcher cast as creative practitioner in-between. © Author, 2018

90

Being in-between 6.2 ‘Their story’: behavioural mapping of residents’ reshaping of shared lounge for a fsh and chip supper. © Author, 2018

91

with some having in-depth lived experience of retirement developments and others not. Taking forward the analogy of the musical score, the stories are those of soloists, duets, and orchestral sections; together they constitute a symphony whose creation was subject both to isolated rehearsals and collective fne-tuning. The research was thereby ‘worked’ akin to a musical score, with the research-writer a conductor with a key presence in each story—sometimes positioned as an invisible yet omniscient third-person narrator, while at other times visible, centre stage, in frst-person narrative ethnographic reporting or in reviewing the efcacy of creative practice as a ‘refective practitioner’.10 The stories Clark

92

positions, implicit values, tacit knowledge bases, and everyday practices. The study should be of special interest to architects as the product of an alternative mode of post-occupancy evaluation that helps to inform or provide feedback to designers. The stories could be divided into two categories: (1) those relating to a production context; and (2) those relating to the inhabitation of architecture. The latter group could be said to meet architectural theorist Marco Frascari’s idea of stories as a means ‘for making sense of both individual experience of architecture and social interactions that take place in it’,12 and therefore have the potential to feed into future stories in support of making age-friendly architecture. I also chose to operate within an expanded interdisciplinary feld—reaching into anthropology, environmental gerontology, and planning—and to move between diferent research audiences, ranging from the developer’s boardroom and spaces of architectural production, through to academic and industry symposia, as well as teaching contexts. Stories make this possible since they are universal and can bridge cultural, linguistic, jargonistic, disciplinary, and age-related divides; stories help us to make sense of our shared world and to pass on that understanding to others. That is to say, stories travel well.

thus refect multiple personas and a changing positionality such that their delivery shifts from ‘their’ story—the story of the informants as observed by the researcher (Figure 6.2)—to ‘our’ story—the story of the informants and researcher interacting in the feld (Figure 6.3)—to ‘my’ story—the story of the researcher making sense of relations with the informants and the research context. In these terms, the research acknowledges the validity of the ‘researcher’s experience’11 and its variable bearing on the inquiry, for the researcher is a conductor making editorial decisions about the reportage and representation of both themselves and the wider Researcher’s story cast involved. This part of the research, confgured It is my belief that the methods as one of the nine actors that I studied, developed through this study could presents aspects of what I call the creative enable diferent stakeholders and/or practitioner’s story: an abridged version disciplines within the retirement-living of the creative practice inquiry from my sector to better relate to each other’s point of view as researcher. Specifcally, it

Being in-between

A B C

A: Occasional (Balloons) B: Standing (Cityscape) C: Seated (Sky Sofa TV)

6.3 ‘Our story’: measured survey drawing indialogue over tea, with views and sightlines from this little corner. © Author, 2018

93

bestows the benefts of a unique positionality, being in and in-between architectural sectors—design, research, and teaching—which enabled an expanded feld of practice and refection. It presents fragments from a ‘self-interview’13 in which I refected on the qualities of being a ‘double agent’ moving between these sectors, often switching identities or personas, with roles ranging from architectural consultant through to ethnographer and pedagogist. The result is an account in which I seek to make sense of my positionality as researcher during the feldwork stages of the project.

Clark

Hedgerow metaphor Early in the research I refected on my position in-between the property developer and the development’s residents, looking and listening in both directions and evolving a sense of empathy for ‘opposites’. To illustrate my position, I

refected on the contrasting viewpoints relating to the provision of communal gardens at retirement-living developments. In one direction, I was invited to see award-winning ‘quality, visual amenity space’, and in the other, I heard about the loss of a safe haven for ‘my late-night walk’. During a research meeting at the sponsor’s headquarters, one director confessed he expected ‘more than three paving slabs to enjoy a glass of wine’, while, during a visit to a development, one resident reported being pleased to have traded outlooks—moving from a private, tall-fenced yard to a second-foor apartment, released from the chores of gardening and with ‘a great view of the urban landscape’. In these terms, I gathered data and constructed an internal dialogue about the design of housing for older people. Later, I then externalised this dialogue in the boardroom of ‘Pink & Knight’. For me,

CONSUMERS ~Purchasers ~Lifestyle-oriented ~Home environs ~Informal

DEVELOPERS ~Providers ~Proft-oriented ~Business environs ~Formal

RESEARCHER Double Agent In-Between Fields Directors (Vantage) Staf CORPORATE FIELD (Pink & Knight)

Residents RESIDENTIAL FIELD (P&K Customers)

UK LANDSCAPE (Older Persons)

6.4 ‘Hedgerow’: conceptual illustration of research positionality, in-between research sites or ‘felds’. © Author, 2018

94

I am an outsider that has been invited inside the ofce, participating in activities ranging from work placements in my student capacity, through observation as a researcher, to forms of architectural consultancy. By extension I have been invited into a number of retirement home settings. At some I have spent the night in the guest suite and had tea with residents in the shared lounge.15

Being in-between

I had taken note of how I presented this is where the idea of distinct research ‘sites’ breaks down, since one is observable myself in each setting. I was aware that by the other. Regardless, I was in-between, not everyone around me could read architectural drawings, and mindful of occupying the neutral, permeable my bias toward spatialising phenomena. I boundary of what I came to think of as also came to appreciate that not everyone a metaphorical hedgerow (Figure 6.4). I holds the same ‘architectural’ values. For was free to visit both sites/settings—or example, my ‘good news’ reportage of pastoral felds—going back and forth how residents were extending their homewhen conditions permitted. From the sanctuary of the hedgerow, it was possible making by placing personal door mats and signs within communal corridors, to see both felds, recall what it is like to inhabit them, and remember the phenom- was met with concern from Pink & Knight directors. For developers, ‘inhabitation’ is ena encountered. In this way, my actions ‘messy’ and can become problematic from mapped onto research scientist John an ongoing sales and marketing point of Creswell’s description of data collection view insomuch that it dilutes the image of in a grounded theory study: ‘a zigzag process: out to the feld to gather information, their product. I also become aware of how research into the ofce to analyse the data, back is perceived by others. In one case, I had to to the feld to gather more information, 14 email staf and their superiors to confrm into the ofce, and so forth’. Speaking my identity was not that of ‘an undercover as a designer—familiar with refexive and BBC journalist, looking to write an exposé’. intuitive ways of working—grounded And yet, when I arrived I had to develop theory has often felt like a more natural reporter-like tactics to solicit interviews, route to acquiring knowledge. since potential informants felt they had ‘nothing much to say’. In this respect, I Research positionality sympathise with architect and academic Through my early refections I observed Mel Dodd who confessed that the ‘idea my changing research positionality, that you’re somehow an expert because moving between disciplinary felds, but you design buildings always makes me also switching identities and roles: feel a bit uncomfortable’.16 I had to fnd ways of diminishing my authority as architect and researcher. Techniques included the avoidance of formal channels, chatting to people in corridors, feigning interest in the smallest details, and being introduced by trusted others, including asking informants to refer me to a friend. Anthropologist Ilan Kapoor argues for self-awareness and for the importance of turning the ‘anthropological gaze

95

upon ourselves before we investigate the Other’.17 I was the stranger in the shared lounge. I did not qualify for residency, nor self-identify as an older person. Yet my age—or lack of—aforded me diferent kinds of access to people and information, particularly in receiving advice on ageing. In this respect, I was ‘non-expert’, although it is hoped that through the sustained periods spent within the same or similar contexts, and the subsequent development of a research practice, I might move towards an expert position. In the words of another architect, and trained anthropologist, ‘my understanding of what I am looking at is changing, and of course I am changing too’.18

Clark

Overall, I enjoyed my fuid research positionality and suspect it has aforded me greater freedom and creativity than if I were an appointed architectural consultant or commissioned researcher. In her book Future Practice, Dodd talks of the importance of swapping places ‘backwards and forwards’ in a way that acknowledges some of the architect’s training, but also the special knowledge and experience of others. The architectural educator, curator, and writer Rory Hyde summarises Dodd’s practice as follows: The ability to inhabit these diferent personas [local, educator, artist, policy maker] is itself a characteristic of a ‘double agent’, who infltrates territories or organisations foreign to one’s own in order to collect intelligence, while actually serving the needs of that foreign organisation. By leaving the traditionally conceived role of the architect behind and embedding within a community, Dodd is able to better understand and serve

96

their needs, even if they’re as humble as a bench.19 I have acted as a double agent towards Pink & Knight and its respective resident owners, gathered intelligence from both sides, and discovered each needs help with articulating and envisioning the physical characteristics of quality homes for older people. I also recognise that my research has taken me to multiple other sites/settings and actors not associated with the sponsor. I therefore consider the research context—‘housing for older people’—better represented as a cluster of felds connected by hedgerow. Multiple felds I often think of the design drawings for architect Dominic Steven’s ‘Hedgerow House’ in Ireland as an architectural metaphor for my own distinctive research positionality. In Stevens’ project the house is imagined as sitting in the hedgerow, positioned at the intersection of four agricultural felds so that each of the main rooms has a diferent aspect and view. Stevens writes: The house takes the form of the hedgerows, thus becoming a part of the edge to four felds instead of standing as an object in space […] Rooms address diferent felds, each room absorbing the character of the feld that it overlooks.20 Large foor to ceiling windows create a feeling of being especially close to the natural world around the house—almost as though the house and its inhabitants are part of the life of the hedgerow. There

The closed feld Perhaps the most surprising aspect of my doctoral work was the relatively shallow depth of feldwork conducted within the sponsor organisation and its headquarters especially. I once had in mind architectural theorist Albena Yaneva’s ethnographic

study of OMA’s design practice as a model.22 The research proposal anticipated a nonprescribed number and length of work placements involving, regular meetings/ presentations with the [research] working group; observations, or shadowing of key actors within company divisions, and site visits, including for-sale developments. These activities did occur, albeit they tended to be arranged on days when I presented research fndings to the boardroom. In this sense, there was always an agenda or rationale for my being there, and a relatively well-defned programme for the day. There was one formal ‘placement’ over four days in July 2014, which involved observing two ‘land, design, and planning’ meetings and a planning inquiry,

Being in-between

is a distinct sense of living both within the hedgerow but also in-between the felds. Stevens remarks on the particular landscape quality of this setting—one of small felds surrounded by thick hedges—and how the land this house sits upon is made of ten felds, each with ‘its own character, as if rooms of a house, and just as in house as you progress deeper into the site the level of privacy increases’.21 And so it was with the research, some felds were just too private or hard to reach within one visit (Figure 6.5).

6

3 1 5

4 6

2

7

1 Occupied Hedgerow 2 Hilltop Vantage 3 Closed Field 4 Unmapped Field 5 Disused Field 6 Thicket 7 Neighbouring Fields

6.5 ‘Field System Mapping’: a multi-sited research landscape as feld system and hedgerows. © Author, 2018

97

plus four semi-structured interviews with professional staf members. These were integral to getting to know the culture of the organisation—its people, management structures, workfows, and processes—as well as identify sector-specifc challenges for the developer. However, when writing up my ‘story’ of the company architect I noted: [my] visits were centred on presenting research plus work around these ‘performances’. I was never treated as one of the staf, left to my own devices, being either hosted or attending to a schedule of prescribed actions. In these terms, I was never ‘in the feld’ with access to everyday activities and observing interactions, etc.

Clark

98

In these terms, I feel I failed to achieve an equivalent depth of ethnographic study of the developer’s headquarters, compared with my research within retirement developments. I have yet to understand why this ‘feld’ was not entered. I might conjecture that the actions of observing and refecting are less understood pastimes in a business environment. What I do know is that not being embedded in this setting helped me to be present in other research sites/settings while maintaining a critical distance from the sponsor, and to some extent perform my role as a critical friend using a variety of diferent personas—academic, student, outside architect—that did not equate to being a fully inducted member of staf.

Closing remark This chapter might be considered a kind of auto-ethnographic account, part confessional narrative and part refective record of a creative practitioner inquiry that adopted a particular research positionality ‘in-between’ felds and sites/settings. While the underlying context of this chapter was a research study into retirement housing, the central subject has been the researcher’s experience—one comprising explorations into a multi-sited research landscape, conceptualised here as a feld system, and involving the occupation of a metaphorical hedgerow. Its purpose is to buoy other researchers that fnd themselves bridging disciplinary modi operandi, blending research methods and/or situated in-between research informants and their respective sites/settings. In these in-between places there is potential for a wider appreciation, as well as scope for creative expression through alternative research writing and representation. In some sense, being in-between is a way of architecting research.

jspui/handle/10443/4365> [accessed 30 March 2021]. 8. Nigel Cross, ‘Designerly Ways of Knowing’, Design Studies, 3.4 (1982), 221–27 . 9. Paolo Boccagni, ‘Multi-Sited Ethnography’, in SAGE Research Methods Foundations, ed. by Paul Atkinson, Sara Delamont, Alexandru Cernat, Joseph W. Sakshaug, and Richard A. Williams (London: SAGE Publications, 2019), [unpag.] . 10. Donald A. Schön, The Refective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (Aldershot: Arena, 1995). 11. Carolyn Ellis and Leigh Berger, ‘Their Story/My Story/ Our Story: Including the Researcher’s Experience in Interview Research’, in Postmodern Interviewing, ed. by Jaber Gubrium and James A. Holstein (London: SAGE Publications, 2003), pp. 157–86 . 12. Marco Frascari, ‘An Architectural Good-Life Can Be Built’, in Reading Architecture and Culture: Researching Buildings, Spaces and Documents, ed. by Adam Sharr (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 224–34 (p. 228). 13. Emily Keightley, Michael Pickering and Nicola Allett, ‘The Self-interview: A New Method in Social Science Research’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 15.6 (2012), 507–21 .

14. John Creswell and Cheryl N. Poth, Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five Approaches (Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications, 2013), p. 86. 15. Sam Clark, ‘Looking Towards Retirement: Housing Older People & Moving Beyond Shades of Grey’, Housing—A Critical Perspective, Liverpool, 8–9 April 2015. 16. Mel Dodd, ‘The Double Agent’, in Future Practice: Conversations from the Edge of Architecture, ed. by Rory Hyde (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 72–85 (p. 77). 17. Ilan Kapoor, ‘Participatory Development, Complicity and Desire’, Third World Quarterly, 26.8 (2005), 1203–20 (p. 1204) . 18. Peter Kellet, ‘Living in the Field: Ethnographic Experience of Place’, arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, 15.4 (2001), 341–46 (p. 342) . 19. Rory Hyde, cited in: Dodd, ‘The Double Agent’, p. 75. 20. Dominic Stevens, Rural: Open to All, Beginners Welcome (Leitrim, Ireland: Mermaid Turbulence, 2007), p. 149. 21. Ibid. 22. Albena Yaneva, Made by the Ofce for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design (Rotterdam: 010, 2009).

Being in-between

1. Andrew Saint, The Image of the Architect (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983). 2. Michael Latham, Constructing the Team: Joint Review of Procurement and Contractual Arrangements in the United Kingdom Construction Industry: Final Report (London: HMSO, 1994), p. 47. 3. Ofce for National Statistics (ONS), Living longer and old-age dependency—what does the future hold?, 24 June 2019 [accessed 30 March 2021]. 4. Matthew Barac, Will Hunter, and James Parkinson, Silver Linings: The Active Third Age and the City (London: RIBA / Building Futures, 2013) [accessed 30 March 2021]. 5. Pseudonym adopted to give anonymity to individuals, as well as protect confdentiality and the corporate image of the sponsor organisation. 6. According to the company’s Annual Report and Accounts (2017). 7. Sam Clark, ‘Architectural Refections on Housing Older People: Nine Stories of Retirement-Living’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Newcastle University, 2018)