Albena Yaneva

Scaling Up and Down Extraction Trials in Architectural Design

How do architects imagine, see and define a distant object that is meant to become a building? How does it become knowable, real? To answer these questions, I follow architects as they fabricate models and scale them up and down at different rates of speed. Instead of being a logical, linear procedure for generating a new object that becomes progressively more knowable, ascending from the abstract to the concrete, scaling is a versatile rhythm, relying on surges, ‘jumps’ and returns. By focusing on the most frequently repeated moves such as ‘scaling up’, ‘jumping the scale’, ‘scaling down’, and describing their cognitive implications, I depict how architects involve themselves in a comprehensive dialogue with materials and shapes. Their material dialogue takes into account dispositions, resistance, stability and other properties that change proportionally with scale. In the scaling venture, two alternative states of the building are simultaneously achieved and maintained: a state of being ‘less-known’, abstract and comprehensive; and a state of being ‘more-known’, concrete and detailed. After multiple up and down transitions between small- and large-scale models, the building emerges, becomes visible, material and real. These scaling trials bring the building into existence.

Making the Social Hold: Towards an Actor-Network Theory of Design

ABSTRACT The article illustrates the potentials of an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) perspective to design. Drawing on ANTs assumption that objects with their scripts and incorporated programs of action compel and rearticulate new social ties, I argue that design triggers specific ways of enacting the social. It is impossible to understand how a society works without appreciating how design shapes, conditions, facilitates and makes possible everyday sociality. Viewed as a type of connector, not as a separate cold domain of material relations, designs investigation might shed light on other types of non-social ties that are brought together to make the social durable. The article also discusses some steps towards an ANT of design and suggests a new research program for design studies.

Mapping Controversies in Architecture

The book tackles a number of challenging questions: How can we conceptualize architectural objects and practices without falling into the divides architecture/society, nature/culture, materiality/meaning? How can we prevent these abstractions from continuing to blind architectural theory? What is the alternative to critical architecture? Mapping Controversies is a research method and teaching philosophy that allows divides to be crossed. It offers a new methodology for following debates surrounding contested urban knowledge. Engaging in explorations of on-going and recent controversies and re-visiting some well-known debates, the analysis foregrounds, traces and maps the changing sets of positions triggered by design: the 2012 Olympics stadium in London, the Welsh parliament in Cardiff, the Heathrow airport runway extension, the Sidney Opera House, the Eiffel Tower. By mobilizing digital technologies and new computational design techniques we are able to visualize the variety of factors that impinge on design and track actors? trajectories, changing groupings, concerns and modalities of action. The book places architecture at the intersection of the human and the non-human, the particular and the general. It allows its networks to be re-established and to run between local and global, social and technical. Mapping controversies can be extrapolated to a wide range of complex phenomena of hybrid nature.

From Reflecting-in-Action Towards Mapping of the Real

In Chapter 8, “From Reflecting-in-Action towards Reality Mapping”, Albena Yaneva, in the first part of her text discusses two possible ways of architectural enquiry: reflective enquiry (recalling a particular example from Donald SchOn to exemplify his understanding of the term); and the mapping controversies method as an example for a hybrid self-exemplifying mode of enquiry. She draws a comparison between ShOn´s descriptions of reflexivity in the studio and the type of reflexivity implied by a mapping controversy experiment. She uses a real case study done by her students on Heathrow airport, but tells the story of what they did as if we were to follow them in the process of mapping a controversy. This description aims at tracing some parallels with ShOn´s approach while illustrating at the same time what it means to engage in such a mapping (it is a social science enquiry into the complexity of design rather than a purely technical mapping of reality - the reader will be told that at the end). She then further explains the mapping controversies approach, its history and how this method has been used in design education. She illustrates how this type of social science enquiry is translated into design, and vice versa, how designers can inform controversy studies in a better way. In her conclusion, she discusses the object/thing distinction in an architectural context, and considers what design education can gain from similar experiments of visualising things as complex ecologies rather than static objects. She also argues for the need of more realistic and less meta-reflexivity-based approaches in design education.

Is the Atrium More Important than the Lab? Designer Buildings for New Cultures of Creativity

Responding to criticism that the pioneers of laboratory studies have neglected the architecture of science labs and have failed to consider the importance of space for scientific practices, a few authors have recently shown an interest in the design and planning process of science buildings. They have convincingly demonstrated the extent to which the power of laboratories depends on sequestrations achieved with walls and doors and have explored how architecture might challenge or compromise the cognitive authority of experimental science (Galison & Thompson, 1999; Gieryn, 1998; Murphy, 2006; Shapin, 1998).

Urban controversies and the making of the social

On the one hand, architectural knowledge advances very rapidly, with new types of materials and technological innovations entering the field and multiplying architectural invention. On the other hand, urban experts, architects and engineers often debate publicly uncertain urban knowledge and technologies, risky plans and daring designs, polarising opinion - as witnessed on numerous blogs, citizen forums and architecture websites. This radical transformation in building technologies, in the reliance upon experts and in the expansion of architectural networks could have remained practically invisible were it not for the presence of another phenomenon: the digitalisation of architecture and the availability of enormous Internet databases. The digital technologies at our command provide us with abundant resources to follow architectural controversies.