Adam Sharr: Architectural Ways of Knowing — Building Today's Design Faculty

TO BE IN PROOF

更新：正式出版的中文版见建筑学报2021年04期

[David Leatherbarrow]

The matter of publications is on the mind of our next speaker, professor adam sharr, head of the school of architecture at newcastle, where adam teaches and leads the programs. Outside the classroom and school, Adam is also editor of, I suppose, one of, if not the leading english language publication, ‘Architecture Research Quarterly’, which has as one of its tasks, the dissemination of productive work in design.

Adam has his own publications, books, and articles and intellectual leadership, and that combined with his sensitivity to the need to disseminate creative work in architecture makes what I imagine will be his presentation to be particularly apposite to our broader concerns. Please Adam if you could load your powerpoint and begin. Thank you very much.

[Adam Sharr]

Thank you, Daqing, David and all, for the invitation to join you for this symposium. I had the great pleasure 2 years ago to travel to Nanjing and Southeast for symposium about tectonics and to meet you, to enjoy your amazing hospitality. And I have very fun memories of your school, your colleagues, your city and campus. So thank you for inviting me again.

The outline of this symposium posed a series of questions, weighing competing priorities in shaping an architecture school. The list includes questions about balancing teaching and research, reconciling doctoral and professional training, navigating the priorities of universities and practice, and academic evaluation of performance metrics asking what a successful architecture school looks like. As you already said in the brief for this symposium, these questions facing research-oriented architecture schools globally, will be differently approached around the world that flavored by different cultural perspectives. I'm going to approach these questions under five headings: Ways of thinking, Research-led teaching, Teaching-led research, Practice-based and practice-led research, and Architectural ways of knowing. I want to talk primarily about what is taught and researched, and how, to reflect more briefly on the whole.

We're gonna speak from the perspective of my own cultural context in the UK of my own school. I want to argue that decisions concerning how to balance research and teaching, how to square academic and professional training, and navigate practice in the academy, all hinge on architectural ways of knowing. There's growing interest from outside our profession in how architects think and know. Many business schools, for example, have become fascinated by what they call design thinking. Works in business studies, such as Nigel Cross and Tim Brown, see that architects and designers approach complicated problems, what they sometimes call wicked problems, such as the complexity of shaping cities or climate change, in messy but synthetic ways. While other disciplines and big organizations frequently seek to deal with big problems by isolating small problems within them, the subjects of concern, and then proceed to get lost in the detail, design thinkers tend to look at problems holistically and work intuitively, chaoticly, messily, incrementally, towards creative outcomes. In short, while many fields choose to compartmentalize knowledge, to deal with complex issues by bracketing out and reducing, architects and designers tend to think creatively across and around them — ignoring, transcending and subverting categories in compartments.

Now, from our theories and practices..., through tacit knowledge and by experience, and becoming more and more widely recognized elsewhere in academia and in organizations, is a distinctive and powerful way of tackling thorny questions and producing new insights. I want to argue here that the best approach to balancing research and teaching, to reconciling academic and professional training, and to navigating practice in the academy, is to stick closely to our architectural ways of knowing.

I'll come back to that, but I want to start by talking about how the questions you raised play out in the context of british higher education in my own school. My school of architecture, Newcastle University in the Northeast of England, is part of a broader school of architecture, planning and landscape. The school is 100 years old in 2022 — one of the oldest university architecture schools in the UK. And Newcastle is a member of the Russell Group of leading UK research-intensive universities. We celebrate this part of what we do being a research-led school of architecture. The UK system involves a 3-year undergraduate degree, 1-year in practice, 2-year master’s, and another year in practice for young architects to reach the final professional exam. Our graduates in Newcastle include, for example, Alison and Peter Smithson, Terry Farrell, the leading South African architect Jo Noero, and the feminist Co-operative Matrix.

There's a tendency to think that researchers in architecture are specialists. Meanwhile, it's commonly assumed that we should educate architects as generalists. That is to some extent right — young architects need to have basic competence. But if you look across leading practices, you'll see that many architects are specialist as well as generalists. The numerous architects in various career stages to prosper in practice, is to have a specialism. Being a specialist in particular materials, extreme conservation, building types, construction elements, or the cultural capital of certain theoretical or design ideas. Such specialists emerged through individual engagement with, and sometimes also the production of, new knowledge through research.

Thus, in our school, we believe it's our job to help young architects find their specialism, or simultaneously engaging them in a general architectural education. To do this, our education draws from the latest research. Moreover, we also seek to equip our students with research skills to stay ahead of the changing world. By cultivating students in the habits and values of research, we argue that we don't just train them to their first day of work, but educate them to lead the professions that they'll retire from. I want to return to that point later.

In our school, education is centered on design studio pedagogy. The studio accounted for 2/3 of the student's assessment alongside elective courses in history and theory, structures and construction, environmental design and practice and management. Our accreditting bodies, and we have two of them in the UK, describe much of what we must teach, but not how to teach it. In this context, then, we seek to integrate research into the curriculum, not just through elective courses, but through studio.

In final year of the undergraduate program and in both years of the master’s, students are offered a choice from a range of design units, we call the ‘studios’, of around 20 students and two members of staff each. These are driven by staff of research agendas. Design agendas integrate requirements of professional accreditation or being oriented around research theme. So, for example, research-led final year master’s design studios in recent years have included: Studio entitled ‘Matter’ involving material prototyping, leading to design investigations into the architectural logics of the materials. Another on ‘Border Territories’ examining through architectural projects in different type of contexts, the cultural and spacial conditions of borderlands. ‘Experimental Architecture’, examining ecological and biological thinking and materials in architecture or ‘Architectural Biographies’, starting with the lives, projects and theories of canonical architects, seeking to remix their ideas into new designs.

Students in these research-led master’s and final year undergraduate design studios produce complete rounded design projects, satisfying professional accreditation. But the project also addressed technical or theoretical research themes, and help students begin to find their specialism. In the master’s program alongside design studios, students can choose either to write a research dissertation, or take a module called ‘linked research’, where they work in small groups with a member of staff on a project, associated with that member of staff on research. Examples of some of these linked research projects include: ‘Testing Ground’, which was a series of student-designed-and-built pavilions such as the one shown in the picture. Using critical and cultural theory to examine the politics of building regulation. Working in Zanzibar, West Africa, establishing an academic framework for planning policies in the unesco world heritage site there in stone town in conjunction with local heritage authorities, and ‘Anthropological and ethnographic work’, looking at the building of informal settlements in Columbia, South America.

In addition, all of our undergraduate students produce a written dissertation, a member of staff led seminars in their area of expertise in relation to which the student chooses their own topic. Sometimes that topics related to the students final year design work, sometimes it's unconnected, but always the dissertation helps students develop research skills, pursue their emerging architectural identity, and begin to find what their specialism was going to be.

The point of telling you all this is to illustrate ways in which we seek to integrate research and education. This work involves what you might call research-led teaching, some people prefer the term research-informed teaching, where staff research and publications informed directly what students are taught, engaging them with the latest knowledge and research methods. But it also includes what might be called teaching-led research, where the open ended design practice is a studio work, lead to research questions and indeed publications. This teaching-led research is, I think, more rare, and I want to give a couple of examples.

First, the student live-build program, ‘Testing Ground’ that I mentioned. In successive years groups of students have designed and constructed a series of pavilions located at Kyoto Forest Park about 60 miles from our city. An extensive forest was planted there 20 to 30 years ago, with non native fir tree species, producing very soft, tender and for use of manufacture chipboard. The chipboard industry has since declined, and the first three commission has struggled to find a market for the timber. The students’ pavilions have tested how to use this locally sourced soft timbering construction, prototyping details and fixings, captured in the published research paper. Moreover, these quick growing fir trees are excellent at absorbing CO2 while they grow. So finding construction uses potentially increased its future planting and helps with the climate emergency. In addition, Most of the student built pavilions were constructed in conjunction with local communities. They've helped to develop the rural economy by enabling tourism. One of the projects was designed for bird watchers. This one seen in daylight is meant for night time as an observatory for star gazing. A further research paper emerged from this work, examining participatory methods and working with local communities.

In my second example, teaching-led research over 8 years led to what we believe to be the largest research grant ever awarded to a school of architecture in the UK. A colleague whose first book was in competing, became interested in biotechnology through the integration of living materials into 3d printing. A Master’s design studio on this topic led to a prize winning conference paper that was co-written by staff and students. We supported that colleague to undertake a mid-career Msc. Synthetic Biology. Working then with colleagues in engineering, he designed a bacteria which produces calcified material when wet, to fill holes in cracked concrete. He ran another studio, examining how bacteria can be programmed to excrete building material. This was developed into a research ground. The group of colleagues subsequently working on these experimental methods, then won a major national research infrastructure fund, recruiting 13 members of staff across a handful of disciplines. A substantial new research group can be seen to have grown directly out of teaching the master's design studio. Through these examples of research-led teaching and teaching-led research, I want to emphasize that teaching and research can confirm each other productively. Done well, they can cohere to engage students in the production of new knowledge, and to employ research towards students, developing their own specialisms, with which they can thrive in practice. I'm gonna come back to that idea as well.

But next I want to talk about a particular circumstance of British Universities. Made by the state and to the dismay of most British academics, England is a leader in the use of data and metrics in the governance of higher education. This includes student satisfaction metrics and university and subject lead rankings. But the most significance of these metrics concerns research. Hugh has already mentioned and it's named REF, the so called research excellence framework. It assessed publications produced by contracted academics working in every academic units in every British university, alongside the research environment of academic units, in the public impact of selected research projects.

There are numerous and justified criticisms of this framework. Though it has at least one curious benefit for architectural research, and that benefit emerges from its particular definition of research. In the terms of the framework, the quality of any piece of research is judged on three tests — its originality, its significance and its rigor, by members of the panel drawn from the relevant discipline. Those tests of research, originality, significance, and rigor, apply across medical and engineering research, the social sciences, and the humanities, and also applied to creative disciplines like art, music, and creative writing. A side effect of testing research in this way, is that it admits non traditional merits of knowledge-making. If a piece of music, a poem, an art work, a graphic novel, and indeed, a work of built or paper architecture, could be shown to make an original, significant and rigorous contribution to knowledge, then it is deemed to be research. This has empowered uk schools of architecture to pursue design research in ways that I think have been proved more problematic elsewhere. This is not to say that everything that architects do is research. Practitioners often called the finding out what we do in studio ‘research’ when more correctly, we're exploring the appropriate list of materials, building products, and so on. But there clearly is a strand of design practice that makes original contributions. The most obvious is perhaps the prototyping of new material like the use of soft timber and bio-design materials that I mentioned earlier. Though, from the canon of architecture, we could choose numerous examples, such as Peter Zumthor’s powerful investigations into the qualities of effective atmosphere, John Hedjuk’s explorations of shape, representation and reciprocity, or Wang Shu’s investigations into the material and typological expression of China's Jiangnan region, with its unique vernacular design tradition.

Prominent in shaping uk design research culture has been in 1993 essay by Christopher Frayling, who was at one time Rector of the Royal College of Art, titled ‘Research in art and design’. Frayling has proposed a threefold categorization of design research in terms of research for, into and through design. Frayling's idea of research for design encompasses cultural, philosophical, sociological, and ethnographic inquiries of the kind that we're familiar with in architectural research, into design cultures and practices, professional values and habits. Research into design in Frayling's way of thinking, meanwhile, is knowledge about design, including, for example, research into materials, digital processes, and historical and theoretical inquiry. Research through design, however, is the most novel, seeking new knowledge through the conduct of design practice. And this kind of research through design can be further characterized in terms of practice-led and practice-based inquiry. Practice-led research is that emerging from practice, pursuing questions significant within that practice, but developed and published separately from it in papers and books. Practice-based inquiry, on the other hand, involves the research of pursuing open-ended research, making things and artifacts through studio workshop practices, through drawing and making. Done in faith that created immersion, rigorously perceived, can lead to original and significant insights.

To give another Newcastle example from my own work with colleagues. We have a practice design research consultancy in this school called Design Office, which in fact only yesterday was included as a winner in london's Architects’ Journal’s prestigious ‘40 under 40’ competition. The office engages in architectural projects, including a handful on our university campus. Fee income from those projects is used to support phd scholarships. Those phd students work on the projects, but also use the projects towards phds by design or what we call phds by creative practice. The office’s built projects all research in themselves. They could, but certainly not in the league of a Peter Zumthor, or Wang Shu, instead, those projects have become catalysts for practice-based inquiry. In one example, so-called Value Engineering or Cost Cutting meetings that colleagues in the office were engaged in, which can systematically strip delight out of the project, became dramatized into a graphic novel Practice Opolis, published by Routledge. This work explored cartooning and storying as research methods, reflecting on the modernization of architects in the construction industry in the UK. Here, architectural practice, understood in terms of research through design and practice-based inquiry. This produced outcomes. This has contributed to university research assessment.

This brings me back to the idea of architectural ways of knowing, not all design is research, but some of it can be, and some of it can be simultaneously research by imagining it as practice-based inquiry and rooting it rigorously in research literature. For us in newcastle, research-led teaching, and teaching-led research, the Link Research projects and Design Office, all involved doing design at a high level in a way which our profession can understand, that which is simultaneously understood as original, significant and rigorous research in the university.

Here, I want to return to the questions that you pose for this symposium about the best approach to balancing research and teaching, reconciling academic and professional training, and navigating practice in the academy. There's a tendency in some schools of architecture in the UK and elsewhere to separate out faculty who research from faculty who teach. In such situations, those who research produce books and papers, might lead lecture modules alongside studio, but rarely teach studio. In that model, those who teach who lead studio tend to practice, but rarely research in the sense of producing original, significant and rigorous artifacts that the universities accept his research.

As you look at it by now, I argue that this culture of separation can be reductive, then we try to overcome it in our school. Most of our scholars are trained as architects, but also have a specialism. In Newcastle, architect specialist in an area leading that area. But at all creative ages, you will also find, for example, specialist in history teaching materials and writing, technical experts contributing to theory courses, bio scientist theorizing ecology, and nearly all of them teach in design studio. Architect-scholars teach studio alongside practitioners who join us on a part time or action basis. Many of them also have their own specialism nurtured across practice in academia. Some of whom join us as partners in research through their practices, or indeed through a part time phd. In terms of faculty, we see contributions from rounded scholars who are specialists as well as generalists. Be they faculty from a practice in research background, or colleagues who join us in a more weekly or more occasional basis from practice.

This approach relies on being confident in architectural ways of knowing. This means being ready to articulate effectively the merits of research for, into and through design and practice-led and practice-based inquiry in the context of university research assessment. At the same time, it involves being ready to articulate the need for research skills and the ongoing pursuit of new knowledge to the profession. It's vital not to separate out research and teaching, academic education and professional training, and practice in the academy, if you ask me. Instead, as academic researchers and designers, we are all in need to engage with, to articulate, and to celebrate the synthetic integrative power of architectural ways of knowing in back academe and in practice, I would argue that this is a central task. Our greatest certainty seems to be an increasing rate of societal and cultural change. Architects can feel marginalized in the uk where big clients in the construction industry tend to listen more to cost experts and to building services engineers than they do to architects. In this context, young architects need research skills to demonstrate their value, and to take control of professional change — other professions, medicine, law, automatory, pharmacy, emphasize their professional knowledge and expertise.

We don't know what the profession will be like that our current students will retire from. But we can be sure that it won't look like today's. Alongside high level design abilities and professional competence, the best thing that we can equip our students with is a set of habits and values of research, and to understand design and research as two sides of the same coin.