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This practical, hands on introduction guides you through the basics of undertaking research in day-to-day architectural practice helping you to exploit the growing opportunities on offer. It explores how developing a research specialism can improve the quality of your projects, help to define your brand and generate new channels of revenue with innovative services for clients. The text is divided into four sections focussing on different types of Architecture Research Practice; commercial, cultural, social and technology. Each section includes a series of inspiring case studies written by practitioners themselves on the way in which research benefits their business as well as an essay by an expert which sets these projects in their methodological context. In this way the book highlights the broad spectrum of research being undertaken and the practical implications for the practice and their projects. This is designed for architects and practices who want to develop a clear specialism that adds brand value and will enable them to access new funding streams as well as students of architecture who are getting to grips with architectural research. This book will inspire cutting edge and innovative architectural practice that can clearly demonstrate its impact and value to non-architect clients.
This practical, hands on introduction guides you through the basics of undertaking research in day-to-day architectural practice helping you to exploit the growing opportunities on offer. It explores how developing a research specialism can improve the quality of your projects, help to define your brand and generate new channels of revenue with innovative services for clients. The text is divided into four sections focussing on different types of Architecture Research Practice; commercial, cultural, social and technology. Each section includes a series of inspiring case studies written by practitioners themselves on the way in which research benefits their business as well as an essay by an expert which sets these projects in their methodological context. In this way the book highlights the broad spectrum of research being undertaken and the practical implications for the practice and their projects. This is designed for architects and practices who want to develop a clear specialism that adds brand value and will enable them to access new funding streams as well as students of architecture who are getting to grips with architectural research.
Over the past decade or so, the wealth produced by Qatar's oil and gas exports has generated a construction development boom in its capital city of Doha and the surrounding vicinity. Since the late 1990s, the number of inhabitants has grown from less than 400,000 to more than 1.7 million today. In many respects, Doha is portrayed as an important emerging global capital in the Gulf region, which has been positioning and re-inventing itself on the map of international architecture and urbanism, with a global image of building clusters of glass office towers, as well as cultural and educational facilities. While focusing on the architectural and planning aspects of Doha's intensive urbanization, this first comprehensive examination of the city sets this within the socio-political and economic context of the wider Arabian Peninsula. 'Demystifying Doha - On Architecture and Urbanism in an Emerging City' features a comprehensive discussion on contemporary architecture and urbanism of Doha as an emerging regional metropolis. It provides a critical analysis of the evolution of architecture and urbanism as products of the contemporary global condition. Issues that pertain to emerging service hubs, decentralised urban governance, integrated urban development strategies, image-making practices, urban identity, the dialectic relations between the city and its society and sustainable urbanism are all examined to elucidate the urban evolution and the contemporary condition of Doha. 'Demystifying Doha - On Architecture and Urbanism in an Emerging City' concludes by suggesting a framework for future studies of the city as well as for investigating the future of similar cities, setting out an agenda for sustainable urban growth, while invigorating the multiple roles urban planners and architects can play in shaping this future.
The discipline of architecture is currently undergoing a significant change as professional practice and academia seem to be transforming one another specifically through succinct research undertakings. This book continues the discussion started in The Changing Shape of Practice – Integrating Research and Design in Architecture on architectural offices’ modes of research and lines of inquiry in architecture and how it reshapes practice. The book aims to contribute to the mapping and discussion on research in architectural practice and its transformational impact and gives input to the discussions on where the architectural profession is heading. In this second volume, various research initiatives and modes in architectural practices are portrayed. The book also includes contributions that broaden the scope and put the developments into larger contexts, and present an overview of developments from different regional perspectives and of various social aspects of architecture. It also relates the developments in practice to educational efforts and to initiatives where the more traditional role of architects is challenged. The contributions include chapters by Walter Unterrainer, Anthony Burke, Renée Cheng and Andrea J. Johnson, and Michael U. Hensel, and on the practices atelier d’architecture autogérée, Helen & Hard, MVRDV and The Why Factory, NADAAA & Nader Tehrani, Nordic – Office of Architecture, Schmidt Hammer Lassen, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Void, Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, and Älvstranden Utveckling.
In this ground-breaking book, the first to provide an overview of the theory and practice of experimental architecture, Rachel Armstrong explores how interdisciplinary, design-led research practices are beginning to redefine the possibilities of architecture as a profession. Drawing on experts from disciplines as varied as information technology, mathematics, poetry, graphic design, scenography, bacteriology, marine applied science and robotics, Professor Armstrong delineates original, cutting-edge architectural experiments through essays, quotes, poetry, equations and stories. Written by an acknowledged pioneer of architectural experiment, this visionary book is ideal for students and researchers wishing to engage in experimental, practice-based architectural and artistic research. It introduces radical new ideas about architecture and provides ideas and inspiration which students and researchers can apply in their own work and proposals, while practitioners can draw on it to transform their creative assumptions and develop thereby a distinctive "edge" to stand out in a highly competitive profession.
What is "urban"? How can it be described and contextualised? How is it used in theory and practice? Urban processes feature in key international policy and practice discourses. They are at the core of research agendas across traditional academic disciplines and emerging interdisciplinary fields. However, the concept of "the urban" remains highly contested, both as material reality and imaginary construct. The urban remains imprecisely defined. Defining the Urban is an indispensable guide for the urban transdisciplinary thinker and practitioner. Parts I and II focus on how "Academic Disciplines" and "Professional Practices," respectively, understand and engage with the urban. Included, among others, are Architecture, Ecology, Governance and Sociology. Part III, "Emerging Approaches," outlines how elements from theory and practice combine to form transdisciplinary tools and perspectives. Written by eminent experts in their respective fields, Defining the Urban provides a stepping stone for the development of a common language—a shared ontology—in the disjointed fields of urban research and practice. It is a comprehensive and accessible resource for anyone with an interest in understanding how urban scholars and practitioners can work together on this complex theme.
Why Architects Matter examines the key role of research- led, ethical architects in promoting wellbeing, sustainability and innovation. It argues that the profession needs to be clear about what it knows and the value of what it knows if it is to work successfully with others. Without this clarity, the marginalization of architects from the production of the built environment will continue, preventing clients, businesses and society from getting the buildings that they need. The book offers a strategy for the development of a twenty-first-century knowledge-led built environment, including tools to help evidence, develop and communicate that value to those outside the field. Knowing how to demonstrate the impact and value of their work will strengthen practitioners’ ability to pitch for work and access new funding streams. This is particularly important at a time of global economic downturn, with ever greater competition for contracts and funds driving down fees and making it imperative to prove value at every level. Why Architects Matter straddles the spheres of ‘Practice Management and Law’, ‘History and Theory’, ‘Design’, ‘Housing’, ‘Sustainability’, ‘Health’, ‘Marketing’ and ‘Advice for Clients’, bringing them into an accessible whole. The book will therefore be of interest to professional architects, architecture students and anyone with an interest in our built environment and the role of professionals within it.
This collection introduces, illustrates, and advances fresh ideas about creative practice inquiry in architecture. It concerns architectural knowledge: how architects can use their distinctive skills, habits, and values to advance professional insight, and how such insights can be extended to make wider contributions to society, culture, and scholarship. It shows how architectural ways of knowing and working can be mobilised as tools for research. Collected here are a series of creative practices that emerge out of architecture and actively engage with other fields and methods reaching across the academic landscape. 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 inquiry vary but they all share a common outward gaze, engaging architectural ways of knowing with other disciplines and practices including the arts, biological sciences, ethnography, and technology. Chapters gathered here offer insight not only into incipient modes and tools of architectural research, but emerging ethical, practical, and philosophical positions intimately tied to the creative practices involved. Setting-out the idea of creative practice inquiry in architecture, this innovative volume offers a lively and resourceful contribution to a growing body of work on design as research. It will be of interest to: students keen to pursue architectural ways of thinking and writing; practitioners who want to use their distinctive professional abilities to contribute to architectural and scholarly knowledge; and academics and doctoral candidates keen to engage with the burgeoning scholarly field of design research.
Architectural institutions are reviewing modes of learning and practice of architecture to reflect the changing professional landscape. Schools confront the ever-acute tensions between critical thinking and the market. The training of architects who will likely be working in different contexts requires new frames of reference and paradigms. What competencies should the practitioner of architecture possess to bridge technical and managerial specializations in light of competitiveness and nuances of culture? How do the practices and performances of the profession take into account the hybrids and collaborations that define the broad scope of projects? The dilemma of competency lies in the rigorous study of the conditions and processes of architecture, configuring and situating skills and capabilities.
This dissertation examines the personal narratives of several aspiring architects to investigate the emergence of “occupational identities”—or how individuals navigate their education to construct a sense of themselves within the architectural community. By interpreting the content of these narratives in relation to several relevant strains of contemporary discourse, this project exposes and foregrounds features of architectural education rarely considered by educators and scholars in the field. Becoming an architect is presented as a holistic experience that requires psychological resilience and meaning-making strategies in the face of various challenges that undermine personal investment and wellbeing. I argue that adopting such an approach towards architectural education is essential to understanding, informing, and improving the profession’s fundamental (yet historically problematic) objective of cultural reproduction. This project is thus meant to set the groundwork for future studies that focus on how aspiring architects navigate the more human dimensions of their education. Twenty-five years ago, in 1991, Dana Cuff published Architecture: A Story of Practice in which she asked “What is the metamorphic transformation of the layperson into the architect?” Interviewing members of the architectural community across the United States, she crafted a compelling narrative that described architecture’s sociocultural milieu. Most notably, she revealed certain schisms, dilemmas, and contradictions integral to the architectural community and the architect’s role in society. For instance, individuals are often initially attracted to architecture based on images of professional practice that they later learn are illusory. This project revisits many of the themes from Cuff’s book, although the story is set in a new historical context. The central tension in architectural culture that she exposed between ideology and action, belief and practice, continues to hold. Yet, a host of structural and cultural changes within and beyond architecture over the past 25 years necessitates a reexamination of architectural education. While the purview and boundaries of architectural practice have broadened and blurred, the profession is increasingly worried about becoming obsolete. The demand on architecture schools, therefore, is to continue attracting future practitioners and educate them to practice competently, on the one hand, and imagine unprecedented modes of practice, on the other. In order to enrich and update Cuff’s story, this project incorporates new understandings of higher education and professional development that foreground holistic and transformative dimensions. For instance, I apply occupational therapy’s notion of “occupation” as a framework to conceptualize how humans engage in activities, make commitments, and belong to various social communities in various ways that form self-identities and shape their future trajectories. Adopting these perspectives demands a more grounded understanding of architectural education that takes into account how aspiring architects grapple with the “occupation” of architecture to develop occupational identities. Borrowing theoretical and methodological approaches from research on narrative identity and occupational engagement, I designed the project as a case study of the University of Washington’s Masters of Architecture program. In-depth interviews with cross-sectional cohorts of participants (including current students, recent graduates, and emerging professionals) elicited narratives of their experience before, during, and after architecture school. I then analyzed and assembled these personal narratives, crafting a composite narrative that ultimately evokes architectural education as a process of personal transformation and meaning-making. In and through their narratives, aspiring architects render themselves as navigating and actively contributing to architecture’s dualistic nature. This understanding directs our attention to the strategies that students and young professionals use to gain entry into and remain invested in an architectural career path. Through analysis of this composite narrative, I reveal how participants view their education as encompassing more than just “learning” in formal institutional settings. Moreover, it became clear that forming a coherent and resilient architectural identity required that one’s narrative integrates aspects of doing, being, becoming, and belonging—or all four dimensions of occupational engagement. This project continues the tradition of demystifying architectural education, by Cuff and other scholars, by foregrounding the voices of aspiring architects. It also challenges educators to redefine “architectural education” more holistically as a set of interrelated commitments, experiences, and relationships. These vectors extend over long periods of one’s life, requiring periodic recalibration of architecture as an occupational identity. Such a perspective is not expected to be met with resistance within the architectural community. Indeed, it resonates with many of the field’s traditions and stated goals, such as self-education and lifelong learning. Yet, it does imply that teaching and mentorship practices, as well as curricular and licensure requirements set by institutional and professional bodies, undergo revaluation to ensure that architecture’s practices align with its beliefs. It also suggests that narratives of aspiring architects—insofar as they reflect the meaning-making and human dimensions of becoming an architect—be taken into account when evaluating architectural education (rather than only considering products as demonstrations of acquired skills or knowledge). Then, the profession of architecture can presumably be better equipped to serve its members and, in turn, society.