Richard Buday’s essay “The Confused and Impoverished State of Architectural Research” in Common Edge is thought-provoking to a degree that I’m not sure how much I actually agree or disagree with it. The core statement, that research is not as prevalent in architecture as it is in similar professions, is hard to argue with, but the analysis of this core could…uh…use some research.
First, I’d like to point out something that I think is obvious but isn’t emphasized in the essay: the study of whether architecture researches enough and why research is treated the way it is within the profession is not an architectural discussion, it’s a sociological one. While any profession can and should self-police and self-study, the practice of watching how architects conduct themselves and how they compare themselves to other professions is an ethnographic study. Nobody wants to feel like a bug under a microscope, but this kind of discussion is more or less the reason why sociology exists.
I started with that topic because it feeds into my biggest gripe about the essay: we need to define “architectural research.” If we’re studying how to best insulate a building to reduce energy use, that’s a technical topic amendable to the scientific method and experimentation. If we’re studying why people feel safe in some public spaces but not in others, when all the spaces in question have similar crime-incident rates, then we’re back to sociology. Experimentation is difficult because it would mean reconfiguring architectural spaces, and the results are largely based on the subjective data of people’s feelings. I’m all in favor of experiment-based research on technical issues, particularly since I see so many failures of waterproofing and other technical systems that could be made better. I don’t see how research of this type has much meaning for the more design-oriented parts of architecture.
It’s surprising how much research is differentiated from design. You don’t have to building a building to see if it makes sense or not if you’ve gone through an honest design process. That’s because the design process includes yet another form of research, looking at previous examples of similar problems and solutions. Historical research is an incredibly powerful tool in design because there are so few truly new problems. In our work we see how designers and builders in the nineteenth century struggled with the same issues that are current now, and how they found solutions using more limited tools and more limited selection of materials and systems than we have now. Our additional options come with additional constraints – architects in the 1850s weren’t measuring travel distance for two egress paths from their interiors, for example – but I’d like to think we’re as clever as our predecessors. If we study their design solutions, we can go farther than them.
Finally, the research/design split exists in engineering as well. There’s plenty of engineering research, but the vast bulk of it is in certain fields of analysis: better predictions of loads (especially wind, snow, and seismic loads), better modeling of materials that (unlike steel) do not have purely elastic or purely plastic responses to stress, creation of better materials. There is surprising little research on how to improve the engineering design process. The study of how engineers design is another sociological topic; how to improve design requires engineers to stop looking at the problem and look at how we solve the problem, and we’re not good at that.
The essay is right that design won’t solve research problems, but the reverse is also true. Experimental research can’t solve design problems. It can help, but there’s a reason that the shorthand for architecture and engineering is “the design professions:” design defines who we are and what we do.
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