If you are interested in Thomas Weaver’s writing, please visit the AA website for the biannual publication under his editorship, AA Files : www.aaschool.ac.uk/publications
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For sure, this unthinking embrace of technological tropes and of architects with science on their minds can be traced to the post-1968 onrush of digitisation, but at the same time the idea of research and architecture goes back much further. What is a PhD or Doctor of Philosophy, for example, if not some strange kind of scientific residue, wherein the highest form of learning or expertise is awarded with a medical title; and what is both the verb and noun best used to describe the task of a doctorate but ‘research’? Couched in these terms, research could be seen to date back as far as the Middle Ages and the first ever doctorates, but more plausibly to early nineteenth-century Germany, when arts faculties started to insist upon an identifiable body of what they termed ‘research’ for all of their graduate degrees. The success of this model meant that it was soon exported to the US as the basis for all of the Ivy League university PhD programmes. In architecture, or more specifically architectural history, this moment and place in time also happened to coincide with the elucidation of the academic discipline of architecture by successive generations of largely German historians – from Semper,
Burckhardt, Fiedler and Riegl, through to Wölfflin, Giedion and Panofsky. All of them explored their subjects with a meticulous, almost scientific sense of rigour (resulting in a body of work that definitively maps an incredibly complex history of ideas), but none of them recognised the need to write this history in anything but the driest and most turgid of prose. And this, ultimately, is the fundamental problem with research – that it has no sense of style, and that it seeks to convince only by the weight and faux immutability of its data rather than by the seductiveness of its thoughts and words. It also panders to the worst aspects of three different national stereotypes – a German dourness, an American military/industrial subterfuge and an English Thatcherite insistence of quantity over quality. So, in the end, what we are promoting when we endlessly talk up research is actually a highly reductive model of intellectual enquiry – one that is humourless, sexless, inarticulate and undiscerning. What we should be championing instead are more engaging models of thinking, and an opposing set of qualities that alternately beguile us with their erudition and assure us with their charm.