Jeremy Till

Architecture and participation

Edited with Peter Blundell Jones and Doina Petrescu. A collection of essays setting out the whys and hows of new approaches to participation. Chapters include work by Jon Broome, Giancarlo de Carlo, CHORA, and my two fellow editors.

Flexible housing: opportunities and limits

Flexibility in housing design has social, economic and environmental advantages and yet is currently often ignored. The first of two papers sets out the history of this issue.

Adapting research activity AHRC review of practice-led research

In 2005 the Arts and Humanities Research Council initiated a review of practice-led research in art, design and architecture. The purpose of the review was to develop a ‘comprehensive map of recent and current research activity in the area’. What quickly became obvious to the team that won the bid to run the review (led by the three authors) was that to map activity one first had to attempt to define it. The term ‘practice-led research’ means many different things to different people and so immediately raises debate. The positions range from those who believe that the act of making or designing alone constitutes research, to those who believe that research (as analytical activity) is incommensurable with design (as synthetic activity). For the former, the knowledge contained within the artefact is self-evident and beyond the need for additional explication; for the latter, knowledge resides outside the artefact and in the realm of its dissemination and interpretation. The importance of the AHRC review is not that it will settle these arguments, but that it will provide a much firmer context in which to place them.

Research and design in academia

In Peter Halls introduction to Leslie Martins ‘The Grid as Generator’ ( arq 4/4) he states that ‘the crucial link between research and design has been fatally lost’ and that ‘it is more than high time that architecture schools begin to rediscover it’. I am not so sure Hall is correct in saying that the link has been broken, though the parameters may have changed since Leslie Martins day. Martins work was set in the context of post-Oxford Conference architectural education and research, with its alliance to the models of the sciences and objective analysis. The link between research and design could then be identified as an instrumental one, with the former directly guiding the latter along prescriptive tramlines. The intellectual strength of such methodological approaches may be apparent, and to some extent they fulfilled the Oxford Conferences mission of saving architecture within the elite academies. But there are also dangers in the determinist use of research to direct design.