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AGAINST RESEARCH Thomas Weaver, editor of AA Files and course tutor in the History & Critical Thinking MA programme, questions research.
Two things happened to architectural education in 1968. The first was in May of that year when a European and then a global wave of student protests (initially against the Vietnam War, but then later in revolt against pretty much everything else) forced the closure of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris – the 350-year-old bastion of not just an architectural education but of a whole aesthetic way of appreciating the built world through a rigorous, if draconian, artfulness. The second was a few months later, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when the US Ford Foundation (famously a covert academic front for the more nefarious ambitions of the CIA) funded the establishment of the MIT’s Urban Systems Laboratory, ‘an interdepartmental and multi-disciplinary laboratory focusing on urban problems’. The consequence of these twin events was that after 1968, whenever any architectural students engaged with the task of further exploring a given subject, they described this process as ‘research’. Before then, the imperative to take in other ideas or sources was called something else. It was called ‘reading’. In many ways, then, the disparity between two different ways of describing curricular or extra-curricular academic study comes down to that hoary old dilemma between architecture as art or as science, or between seeing the stuff of learning as made up of either an irresolute but vital assemblage of ideas or a quantifiable and calculable set of data. What seems clear today, though, is that the paradigms offered by science still appear to occupy the dominant position. Like MIT in the 1960s, the artful architectural studio is increasingly being transformed into the artless design laboratory. And with this
recasting, words like ‘disciplinarity’, and its bastard child ‘inter-disciplinarity’, have started to pollute all presentations, as has the notion that a design only now emerges as a consequence of objective environmental forces rather than subjective cultural, historical and aesthetic ideas. Of course, the Trojan Horse of this appropriation is the computer itself, today no longer simply understood as the mechanism that allows for a certain enlightenment but as a model for a way of intellectualising and articulating based only on incontestable input and output. The abbreviations of this scientific language have even gone on to establish some kind of weird syntax of their own – with the first move of any design study, seemingly protected by the cloak of irreducibility that science affords, now branded as v_01.1 – as if, like some inflexible DOS system, our brains can no longer understand proper words. Interestingly, this shift has also gone on to enter the way architects name their practices. When, in 1979, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio set up their own office in New York, they played-off the zany avant-gardism of their first projects by juxtaposing it against the precise mathematical clarity of their office name: Diller + Scofidio. A few years ago Foster and Partners employed the same trick (despite the obvious absence of any design radicalism), as part of the firm’s hugely expensive rebranding, dropping the ‘and’ in favour of the plus sign, and in the process establishing some kind of parable – when a firm like Foster starts tagging itself like an algebraic equation then you know immediately that this marriage of science and architecture is no longer part of the vanguard but is something at once predictable and highly corporate.