Description
Book SynopsisThis 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, cartooningâthe tools and methods of each inquiry vary but they all share a common outward gaze, engaging architectural ways of knowin
Trade Review
"Architecture, as a discipline and a profession, is slowing awakening to the methodological opportunities availed by creative practice research. This collection offers myriad situated examples of how creative practice research performs its important work, paying attention to material relations, place-based concerns as well as mobilising the powers of the imagination."
— Hélène Frichot, Professor of Architecture and Philosophy, The University of Melbourne
"For anyone interested in the creation of our built environment including practitioners, students and academics, Creative Practice Inquiry in Architecture provides vital new answers to the question of the nature of architectural research. It reveals research by design is a rapidly growing field that operates from within the field of architecture while integrating creative combinations with external innovations. This volume of essays brings together insightful overviews of the issues with case studies that reflect a range of research sites and approaches based within a diversity of geographic locations. By taking us inside rigorous architectural research based in archive, studio, office, experimental lab and building site, that includes new technologies and materials, this book explains how we can move beyond traditional divisions between theory and practice."
— Paul Emmons, Patrick and Nancy Lathrop Professor of Architecture, Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center, Virginia Tech
"This volume is a beautiful coming of age — a vibrant gathering of essays and projects that show with confidence and sensitivity what this field, after at least two decades, is capable of. Traversing the institutional boundaries that all too often still divide the studio from the seminar room, Creative Practice Inquiry in Architecture makes vital reading for anyone embarking on a creative journey of their own, and for those keen to dive into this exciting form of architectural research in all its subtleties and depths."
— Jane Rendell, Professor of Critical Spatial Practice, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
Table of ContentsOpenings 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 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 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
