Creative Practice Inquiry in Architecture

Description

This collection introduces, illustrates, and advances fresh ideas about creative practice inquiry in architecture. It concerns architectural knowledge: how architects can use their distinctive skills, habits, and values to advance professional insight, and how such insights can be extended to make wider contributions to society, culture, and scholarship. It shows how architectural ways of knowing and working can be mobilised as tools for research. Collected here are a series of creative practices that emerge out of architecture and actively engage with other fields and methods reaching across the academic landscape. Architectural inquiries collected in this book probe matters that lie beyond the obvious expectations, the conventions, the default, of the discipline. Drawing, borrowing, adapting, dramatising, perhapsing, monstering, experimenting, cartooning—the tools and methods of each inquiry vary but they all share a common outward gaze, engaging architectural ways of knowing with other disciplines and practices including the arts, biological sciences, ethnography, and technology. Chapters gathered here offer insight not only into incipient modes and tools of architectural research, but emerging ethical, practical, and philosophical positions intimately tied to the creative practices involved. Setting-out the idea of creative practice inquiry in architecture, this innovative volume offers a lively and resourceful contribution to a growing body of work on design as research. It will be of interest to: students keen to pursue architectural ways of thinking and writing; practitioners who want to use their distinctive professional abilities to contribute to architectural and scholarly knowledge; and academics and doctoral candidates keen to engage with the burgeoning scholarly field of design research. Cover Title Dedication Copyright Contents Endorsements Openings Introduction: creative practice inquiry in architecture Acknowledgements Exposition and the staging of encounter: on assessing unconventional research outputs Inquiries Archival practices Situational perhapsing Draught/draft papers Office practices Storying Practiceopolis Into the void: drawing-out the default space of the suspended ceiling Amateur adaptions Place-based practices Being in-between: a multi-sited ethnography of retirement housing Learning from Tokyo: reading architecture and urbanism through Deleuzian lenses Between there and here: drawing an alternative future for Wenzhou Building practices Building, in the field At home on site: expanding the field of architectural research Studio practices The Studio Apparatus Discordant forms: seeking the transitional object in axonometric projection Holding space in the post-digital: thinking through the Zoom studio Machine practices The architect’s cognitive prosthesis: a dialectical critique of Autodesk Revit Neoliberal spectres: on creative practice and resisting instrumentality Material practices Biomaterial probes: creative practice engagement with living systems Biodesign research in the Anthropocene Liquid Architecture: design in a state of flux Decentring humanism: working with nonhumans through the process of experiment On reflection Out of bounds: methods and outputs of the architect-researcher Contributors Figures Index