Isabelle Doucet

Transdisciplinary Knowledge Production in Architecture and Urbanism

The chapter discusses Mode 1 and Mode 2 forms of knowledge production from the perspective of the authors’ practice as educators at a doctoral level for PhD students based in the practice of architecture, design and the arts. It builds on a series of lectures and seminars which have explored the potential of transdisciplinarity and Mode 2 knowledge production for practitioners in various design professions, and focused on various existing “knowledge landscapes” as well as on the more recent developments with regard to emerging new modes of knowledge production. The article attempts to grasp the meta-level issues of a new mode of knowledge production and the opportunities it brings with regard to design research. It discusses the development of architectural research during the last four decades together with the essential features of Mode 1 and Mode 2, and tries to relate these features to contemporary architectural and design theory, and various practices in architecture and urban design. As the “scaffold” for constructing this chapter, the authors propose to discuss, firstly, the Scandinavian development of the doctoral scholarship in architecture, and secondly, the international debates that have constituted the backcloth of this development with regard to the three major modes of knowledge production: monodisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. Knowledge production in the area of transdisciplinarity and creative practice was previously seen as outside of research and scholarship, while developments of the last decade have made it possible to conceptualise the knowledge field of design and architecture in new ways. An inclusive model of research is emerging where more practice-based approaches are possible, and it is beginning to achieve academic recognition as well as vital interest from practitioners.

Editorial: Transdisciplinarity, the Hybridisation of Knowledge Production and Space-Related Research

Following a long period of ever-increasing specialisation, a need for more relational knowledge has become apparent. The hybridisation of knowledge production has become a widespread and intensively debated issue within the scientific and academic communities. With the breakthrough of systems theory,1 a new epistemological perspective has been launched that seeks to understand the whole of the mechanism at work (system-oriented) instead of focusing exclusively on fragments and parts (object-oriented).

Resist, Reclaim, Speculate: Situated perspectives on architecture and the city

With this special issue of Architectural Theory Review, we set out to discuss theory (of architecture) as a practice. In order to resist what we perceive to be the persistent division of labour between theoria and praxis, we want to expand and reclaim what can be included under these rubrics.1 And we want to do this in such a way as to draw attention to the specificity of situations. Practices (of space, of architecture) are always entangled with the lives of people, places, and things. They refer to specific, situated problems in response to which we believe it is crucial to resist ready-made answers and to accept the constraints of the milieu in which we find ourselves. We thus call for situated, relational, and embodied perspectives in architectural scholarship rather than distant, autonomous, and authoritarian ones. But we also ask how, in undertaking this work, we can strive to reclaim a capacity for agency in situations that have become oppressive or where power relations have become imbalanced. We feel confronted with the difficult task of resisting how the situations we study are presented to us (through theory) and of speculating instead on how these situations might be envisioned otherwise by reclaiming other (forgotten, inconvenient, odd…) versions of such situations. We draw our inspiration from radical (feminist) thinkers, including Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and Karen Barad. The relevance of these perspectives for architectural and urban studies—and more specifically, Donna Haraway’s “situated viewpoints” and Isabelle Stengers’ “ecology of practices” and “cosmopolitics”—are becoming increasingly evident.2 With this special issue, we ask explicitly how such approaches can inform new critical engagements with architecture and the city. Through slowing down, hesitation, and “category work”,3 we have invited scholars to resist the taxonomies and conceptual categories with which they have become accustomed, or feel obliged, to think. Our proposal for this special issue also reads as an invitation to reconnect with (hi)stories and (radical) imaginations that tell alternative stories. And through reconnecting with situated stories, we argue that other forms and imaginations of engagement, of resistance, can emerge. Hence our cry: Resist, Reclaim, Speculate! In asking how theory “as a practice” can respond to our cry, we believe three moves are necessary. Firstly, we ask: What are the methodological and ethical consequences of considering theory as a practice? Secondly, we take this challenge as an invitation to expand our understanding of what should be included in the discussion of architecture, which is also to ask what “matters” to the understanding of architecture? Finally, what kinds of stories emerge when we respect the situated nature of the spaces, buildings, plans, and issues we study? And how do these stories make a difference?

Learning in the ‘Real’ World: encounters with radical architectures (1960s–1970s).

ABSTRACT Throughout the 1960s and 1970s architectural education saw to the emergence of radical attempts to reconnect pedagogy with ‘the real world’ and to forge greater social responsibility in architecture. From this epoch of important political, social, and environmental action, this article discusses three ‘encounters’ between architecture and pedagogy with the aim to study how architecture can contribute to learning innovation. While the International Design Conference held in Aspen in 1972, shows how architects and educators explored the potential of the city as a learning resource, architect Cedric Price’s radical proposals for mobile forms of learning, demonstrate the importance of visionary imaginations. Finally, revolutionary-anarchist architects and planners of the time, including Colin Ward and Brian Anson, experimented with the empowering potential of education. Via these three encounters, this article highlights the role of imagination and experimentation, typically associated with architecture, in triggering societal and pedagogical change.

Architecture between Politics and Aesthetics: Peter Wilson's "Ambivalent Criticality" at the Architectural Association in the 1970s

Through which registers does criticality operate in architecture and how can its political, social, and aesthetic concerns be reconciled? Such questions were at the centre of the post-1968 crisis of criticality and have resurfaced in recent debates under the banner of the “post-critical”. This paper contributes to the historicising of this debate through the unpacking of Peter Wilsons The Fire: 2, a 1974 student project he developed at the Architectural Association (AA) in London. The Fire: 2 is an imaginary scenario for a post-disaster London and comprises of a monumental, enclosed ensemble of seven 1 km × 1 km squares connected through the River Thames. Through Wilsons project, this article challenges an overly dismissive evaluation of (all) postmodern architectural drawings as mere stylistic reverie. Historically, it contributes to a deeper understanding of the convergences and tensions between politics and aesthetics, and between disciplinary critique and an engagement with the world “out there”, at the dawn of architectural postmodernism. The Fire: 2 is particularly instructive since it is not only a product of the AA, which played a pivotal role in the formation of the critical discourse of the 1970s and 1980s, it is also the product of a student who, immersed in a politically charged AA, set out to craft his own architectural voice in both political and aesthetic terms. In order to access the resultant ambivalent criticality, I will not explain the project through unproductive pairs such as opposition–appeasement, politics–aesthetics, or withdrawal–engagement. Instead, I unpack the different registers of critical engagement that are at work in the drawings. Because Wilson deploys the drawings as a vehicle for both personal, artistic expression and critical engagement, The Fire: 2 offers a unique resource for revisiting this recent history.