aae2016 Research Based Education - Volume One
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turbine that Yoonjin imagined could power her headquarters building, or another variant of water turbine that Jack Sardeson prototyped for the culverted River Fleet in Farringdon, designed around the properties of a Basking shark’s mouth. The third theme is to embrace the role of people’s subjective emotions, as in the sun-funnelled light within an underground workers’ bank designed by Sam Coulton in the City of London, or the shimmering park of illusions by Katja Hasenauer near to Old Street. The above students are from Years 3-5, but the principle of introducing students to design research can also bear fruit even earlier in the educational cycle. A current Year 2 student in my unit, Peter Davies, who in what is after all only his first term after First Year, has produced an amazingly exacting sequence of studies to explore the latent ‘softness’ that can be found in the Brutalist architecture at Alexandra Road and the Barbican through the analysis of colour spectrums and reflectivity. None of this line of investigation was stipulated in the unit brief, but is Peter’s own explorations of this year’s theme of softness in the city. What this will do, hopefully, is to push this approach further in Peter’s education, as well as other students, which they can then develop over in their career to reinforce the sheer range of research and innovation created by architects. What, however, I think needs to be added more into the mix is a closer link to political and social intentionality, to give a real driver for the pursuit of design research in architecture. I have tried in my own ways to achieve that goal. Along with my colleagues Yara Sharif and Nasser Golzari, who with me constitute the Palestine Regeneration Team, we use a researchled approach in our design consultancy for the rebuilding of disused historical towns in the West Bank. Here our explicit aim is to use architectural and urban interventions to offer opportunity and hope to a Palestinian population overwhelmed by the imposition of Israeli military power, as a deliberate means of giving architecture some genuine traction. Yet this is only to look back to a formidable predecessor, Cedric Price, whose archives in the Canadian Centre for Architecture reveal the astonishing spectrum of research undertaken for his projects, itself as an extension of the promotion of cybernetics and other trendy ideas in his AA teaching. This expansive research approach was applied not simply for the better known Fun Palace and Potteries Think-Belt, but also schemes like the Interaction Centre in Kentish Town and the Snowdon Aviary in London Zoo. Price’s work sits very much in the pioneering stage of design research, with lateral thinking and processes of investigation being treated as important as, if not more important than, actual proposals for new buildings. Today, the development of a richer and subtler approach to design research in architecture is, I would argue, the most vital contribution that our current generation of educators can make to architectural education. The advent and gradual acceptance of the approach known as design research over the past two decades has offered the first genuine opportunity to create not only research-based architectural education, but also research-based practice. By fully accepting the broad church covered by design research, and by discussing how the approach can be embedded into the educational process for forthcoming generations of young architects, the opportunities for the future become obvious. I repeat that this is an argument to be developed not only on the usual aesthetic and pedagogic grounds, but also in relation to the general role and status of architects in political and economic terms. It will therefore stand the AAE and British schools of architecture in very good stead if they now use their collective resources to acknowledge, celebrate, and develop the innovation represented by design research in architectural education.