Symposium

EXPLORATIONS IN ARCHITECTURE: METHODOLOGY

Date: Thursday, November 13th 2008
Time: 18:00 - 20:30 CET
Place: ETH Zurich, Campus Hoenggerberg, HIL Foyer in front of E3

With:
Preston Scott Cohen (GSD Harvard / Preston Scott Cohen Inc)
Harry Gugger (EPF Lausanne / Herzog & de Meuron)
Ursula Pia Jauch (University of Zurich)
Werner Oechslin (Institute gta, ETH Zurich)

Organized and moderated by Ole W. Fischer (Institute gta, ETH Zurich)

With an introduction by Reto Geiser (curator of the Swiss Pavilion at
the Biennale di Venezia 2008)

An event featured by the Swiss Pavilion of the 11th international
Biennale di Venezia "Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Research,
Design" curated by Reto Geiser in cooperation with the Department of
Architecture DARCH, ETH Zurich.

http://www.gta.arch.ethz.ch/d/moravanszky/veranstaltungen.php?id_veranstaltung=411
http://www.explorationsinarchitecture.ch

Problem Statement:

"Research" and "innovation" have become keywords in the contemporary
discourse on architecture and architectural education. This results
from a series of reasons, to name but a few: first "research" is
nowadays a political necessity in schools of art and architecture to
maintain their status as universities and academies. Second, there is
an increased emphasis on third party funding within academic
environments that foster new fields of "research". This challenged the
traditional division between the studio system and master classes on
one side and the adjunct institutes of sciences, technology, and
humanities on the other. In the past, "research" was delegated to
those institutes and followed the rules of conduct of the minor
subject ? historiography, sociologic field studies, material science,
etc. In the past decade, there have been several attempts out of the
growing interest in "research" to enlarge the scope to architectural
design itself. Yet even outside academia, in architectural practice,
"research" and "innovation" have become indispensable parts of the
rhetoric of the discipline, claiming validity or intellectual surplus
value for the client, user and society at large - maybe, because
science, or better "scientificality", could be read as the last great
narration of contemporary culture.

But as soon as we talk about research in design and research on
design, the question arises, how can "research" be understood in
respect to a creative as well as technical and yet applied activity
such as architecture? The established definitions of "research" in
natural sciences as well as humanities hardly seems applicable for the
practice of design, but we might ask, if a transfer or translation
into architecture - or a modeling of "architectural research"
following these examples - would be possible and fruitful. So what
about the other way around, if we think architecture as science, as a
specific form of knowledge? Does architecture contribute to knowledge
production (Erkenntnis) and in what respect? If so, how is knowledge
generated in architecture and in architectural design? What would you
regard as subject of a specific architectural form of knowledge and
knowledge production, what as architecture's methods and its field of
inquiry?