For presentation to professional doctorate colleagues, I have been obliged to put together a statement describing where I’m coming from (personally and philosophically) in framing an approach to my proposed research. My starting-point is my role as architect/teacher: perhaps this reflects a perennial conflict within the RIBA – whether its mission is to promote architects (with business objectives) or architecture (with a social dimension). Accordingly I lead a double-life as both Director of 2hD Architects, a small firm seeking to grow its business in the interests of spending proportionately more time on design than on administration, and as a Senior Lecturer in NTU School of Architecture seeking to enthuse and equip a new generation of practitioners.
What I teach – consistent with how I practise – is the importance of taking nothing for granted / questioning everything (eg challenging the brief) but instead always applying creative imagination in the exercise of the required sensitivity (design and management skills) and in the deployment of technical and professional knowledge. This habit of ‘making strange the familiar’ (I must locate the origin of this quotation – slide 80 in today’s workshop) turns out also to be an essential ingredient in approaching the DArch research: I am required to identify a ‘methodology’ suited not only to my research question but also to my beliefs (‘ontology’) and values (‘axiology’). It is a remarkable and fortunate coincidence that my practice, my teaching, and now my research also, all permit me to express the same characteristic – rooted somewhere deep in my personal identity / psyche.
Not objectivist but objectionable: I am aware that I habitually adopt and express a deliberately oppositional or sceptical stance in immediate (unthinking) response to every idea I encounter, which I then seek to post-rationalise – often masking any antisocial negativity through an idiosyncratic kind of fanciful logic that I describe as ‘experimental hermeneutics’ (a surrealistic cabaret performance in the tradition of Alfred Jarry). Clearly, this reflects what educationalists would term a ‘social constructivist’ ideology – suggesting that individuals should be permitted (and encouraged) to create their own world-views. A fundamental democratising ‘mission’ underpins my teaching objectives, my design concepts, and my aspirations for the role of architecture in relation to society: as a child of the 1960s, I remain committed to ‘power to the imagination’ – my core belief is that people should be empowered to re-make the world around them in accordance with their needs and aspirations.
The same instinct must therefore shape the approach I now adopt to my research: its relevance must stem from an emphasis upon making a change rather than merely observing, upon re-framing rather than simply explaining – demanding a focus upon the future (and how we can influence it) rather than a retrospective (as if hoping at least to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past). Such an open-ended attitude to the future, aiming to provide maximum room for potential action, demands the ‘suspension of disbelief’ that characterises what I promote as the most effective kind of design processes: this involves not taking decisions until as many parameters have been taken into account as programme and budget permits, in order to accommodate and reconcile as many conflicting requirements and considerations as possible, so that nothing needs to be added afterwards as an ‘afterthought’ – the model being a classical definition of aesthetic integrity (Aristotle ‘Poetics’) as the condition where nothing can be added or removed without spoiling the whole).
In the same way, my research process must (in its initial phases at least) involve consideration of evidence before the formulation of coordinating theory - an ‘inductive’ approach. How one selects this evidence must therefore proceed upon the basis of something that might be called ‘non-theory’ (I must find out if it is!) – borrowing an appropriately sceptical and paradoxical concept from postmodernist thinkers such as Bruno Latour (in the attractively disreputable ‘continental philosophy’ tradition). I would propose to adopt an essentially pragmatic approach, temporarily accepting whatever material becomes available ‘at face value’ and not closing down options for its interpretation until the last possible moment – perhaps I need to call this ‘delayed interpretavism’, and perhaps this also represents ‘speculative realism’.
Lots of long words, but perhaps academically appropriate in clarifying one’s philosophical standpoint before the research process begins. It is not a standpoint that emerges from the material, but one that (I hope) may serve to shape what kind of material we look for, and will certainly determine how we analyse the evidence we gather. After that, perhaps, one may reflect more productively on whether or not the initial ontology/axiology/epistemology was a useful tool for unlocking new insights. In this sense, the research may be regarded as testing not some hypothesis but a methodology.
I arrive at last at a research strategy. The next step is to undertake a review of the literature – a) to explain and support my proposed methodology, and b) to outline the scope of my study-area by defining key concepts and demonstrating where further work is required (in order to justify the need for my proposed contribution to the field). In terms of my DArch programme, this will be ‘Document 2.’
I will then (in DArch ‘document 3’) seek answers to the question ‘who has managed to combine community ethos and practice development most successfully, and how have they done this?’ – looking in particular at the techniques deployed in relationship to community engagement. I have a hunch, however, that the overall conclusion to my research will be that it is not actually these techniques that matter the most in terms of business growth, but other ‘secondary’ activities associated with community projects – such as the opportunities for publicity and marketing that such projects represent. My methodology at this stage will be the objectivist case study, concluding with comparative evaluation of the firms’ facts and figures, in order to discover whether there are any common factors characterising the best/worst performers in terms of business growth. The topics covered by the case study will have emerged from my review of the literature (commenced in ‘document 2’ but continuing in the interests of maintaining currency).
DArch ‘document 4’ will then test the ‘success factors’ (but not the ‘failure factors’ – on the grounds that this would be practically unrealistic, being commercially undesirable, if not also socially unethical). The testing would involve me in Action Research, using one or two 2hD projects as an opportunity to try out certain community engagement techniques (and perhaps some of the other ‘secondary’ activities associated with them) in order to double-check their effectiveness as tools for business growth.
At some point in what currently feels like a long-distant future, I will finally be able to draft some conclusions in respect of what works, what kinds of approach or activity to avoid – DArch ‘document 5.’ If summarised in terms of recommendations for the profession (whether as ‘principles’ to be adopted, or as a ‘process’ to be followed – perhaps in a form suitable for insertion into a practice’s quality manual). Perhaps at that point, I will at last have begun to bridge the great divide in the profession between the private pursuit of commercial interests and the public exercise of social responsibility.
“In the profession” only? This is surely what yesterday’s election was all about – a choice between whether we should govern ourselves in accordance with socialistic or capitalistic values. Does this make me a ‘liberal democrat’, I begin to wonder?