The problem of architectural research.

Making architecture is an optimistic activity, engaged with the future and therefore speculative in nature. You might say that, with the substantial exception of repeat buildings or structures, to make a building is to undertake a piece of research, using that word colloquially. In a strict academic sense, however, there is a problem in suggesting that designing a building constitutes more than an experiment, that is to say one of potentially many options that the architect might have conceived and caused to be built. At what point does the single experiment, no matter how much investigation and analysis may have gone into it, constitute research in the sense that it ticks the necessary boxes to attract government grants, university approval, and peer academic acceptance? How many parallel experiments are required? A conference at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London last month brought this problem into sharp focus. Its title 'Design as Research' immediately prompted the question as to whether such a proposition was justified. It also acted as a reminder of the loose way in which the word 'research' is used. (In the world of television, it is more or less a synonym for plagiarism.)

During the course of the conference, it became apparent that even those architects at the cutting edge of design and technological innovation are generally, by virtue of their size, more engaged in pushing manufacturers to advance their thinking than in doing direct research themselves. This is nothing to be ashamed about. Architectural practices are not university departments; on the other hand, university departments are entirely dependent on practice, past and future, to create the buildings which subsequently become the subject of rigorous academic research of a conventional sort. The irony is that architectural history and theory are more easily categorised as research territories than the processes that make them possible; hence the old joke that something may work in practice--but does it work in theory?

In Britain, the question of how to define architectural research has created serious problems for some universities which have taken a broad view, and suffered financial and status penalties when judged by narrower national criteria. This problem is being addressed by clearer rules of engagement, which will partly deal with the question of what constitutes architectural knowledge, and how that knowledge is exchanged between those who make the built environment. Whatever may transpire, pure architectural research will not, of itself, change the climate in which architecture takes place; that would require a change in the culture of architectural practice, where designers are over-obsessed with what other architects' buildings look like, rather than how (or whether) they make sense for users. An art history world view does little for a profession that depends on making buildings and places actually work.