Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
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ItemParticipation in architecture: agonism in practice( 2018)Literature about participation in architecture promised architecture the restoration of a moral dimension, arguing that participation would offer opportunities for empowerment and deliver broad benefits. To its disservice, the field of participation has been dominated by a rational ideology, and a focus on agreement and decision-making – incorporated in the term ‘consensus’. The dominant approach to participation has been at the expense of difference, passions, arguments, resistances and tensions present in the participatory process – incorporated here in the term ‘agonism’. Exacerbating this gap between consensus and agonism, a lack of real-world examples and analysis of everyday participation, has led to a quite limited practical language about participation or descriptions of the concrete process of participation in action, and arguably an avoidance to design and critique participatory processes in architecture and urban design. This Doctor of Philosophy attempts to do participation in architecture through a series of Creative Works in practice, by carefully considering approach, and, designing for difference and bottom-up empowerment of others with social, physical, emotional and psychological benefits specific to each project. The methodology exposed the realities of participation in architectural design practice with communities, highlighting social themes for exploration and multiple modes for practice. This research project demonstrates that agonism is an action-orientated way forward for participation, arguing that the tension between architecture and participation is actually productive. It concludes that difference rather than consensus is crucial to participation, suggesting for architectural and urban design practice that the philosophical role of an architect is to consciously create and maintain opportunities to keep alive the participatory process in the world, by critically designing participation.
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ItemConstructing bodies: gesture, speech and representation at work in architectural design studios( 2009)Previous studies of the design studio have tended to treat learning to design as a matter of learning to think in the right way, despite the recognition that material artifacts and the ability to make and manipulate them in architectural ways is important to the design process. Through the use of empirical data gathered from watching design teachers and students in action, this thesis works to discover how material things and bodies are important to the fabrication of architectural meaning and architectural subjectivity within design studios. In particular the role of gesture is highlighted as doing important work in design studio knowledge practices. The approach taken in this thesis is to treat design activity in design studios in a ‘post-human’ way. An analytical eye is turned to how things and people perform together and are organised in various ways, using Actor network theory (ANT) as a way to orientate the investigation. The assumption drawn from ANT is that that architectural meaning, knowledge and identity can positioned as network effects, enacted into being as the design studio is ‘done’ by the various actors — including material things, such as architectural representations, and human behaviours, such as gesture. Gesture has been largely ignored by design studio researchers, perhaps because it tends to operate below the threshold of conscious awareness. Gesture is difficult to study because the meanings of most gestures produced during conversations are spontaneous and provisional. Despite this humans seem to be good interpreters of gesture. When studied in detail, ongoing design studio activity is found to rely on the intelligibility of gesture done in ‘architectural ways’. The main site for the observation of gesture during this study was the ‘desk crit’ where teachers and students confer about work in progress. In the data gathered for this thesis gesture is found to operate with representations in three key ways: explaining and describing architectural composition, ‘sticking’ spoken meanings strategically to representations and conveying the phenomenological experience of occupying architectural space – the passing of time, quality of light, texture and movement. Despite the fact that most of the work of the thesis centres on human behaviour, the findings about the role of gesture and representation trouble the idea of the human as being at the centre of the action, putting the bodies of teachers and students amongst a crowd of non human others who participate together in design knowledge making practices.