For the research in architecture.
(investigations of the role of architecture today)
We consider it is not necessary to look to the very distant past. In the era of modernism, architects spend time and energy in proposals and design researches (individual or in collective level, for example CIAM congresses) that none had asked them. They were not paid for them. It was their offer to the community. In that way however they managed to claim a progressive and pioneering role in the society and compose a power bonding with the intellectuals and the artistic community. This was similarly achieved by the architects in the interwar, with their utopist design proposals, as in the second wave of utopism, the decade the ' 60. The architect, with the research by design in various periods of 20th century, accomplished to formulate social problems and to promote innovative ideas, activating the expectations and the requirements of social body and constituting powerful alliances in social level. It found himself having a leading role in the cultural circle of intellect and artists. These were achieved because it accomplished to assemble in his activity all the tools which possesses: His designing tools (with which produces space and vision, are what activate the human abstractive thought) and his constituted and disciplined thought with which: a) he conceives the problems and changes them in spatial proposals and b) ensures the points of contact with other scientific communities constituting a common interdisciplinary theoretical background.
Today, in this environment that re-defines each sector of collective life, architecture is called to carry out this double role: to answer to modern problems using his own tools and to allocate simultaniously time and effort for the search of common language with the other cognitive regions. It is called, with few words, to participate in a common environment (social, cultural, scientific), contributing its, particular, means through which it conceives the world.
The determination therefore, of the character that can have an architectural research and the role that it can allocate in the modern environment becomes today the catalyst of architectural community. The architectural research has the possibility of constituting the relation of architecture with other cognitive areas and of developing a common field of exchange. It can through this position delimit as a research field, to formulate its research subject and its intentions. It can therefore claim its own place in the research community and in the society, guarantee the process of research in the sector of architecture and to use it as a powerful strategic option, claiming its role in the society (what this may mean for the architect even in the level of its social award for his role). In a community which does not look like it has yet recognized architecture not only institutionally, but even as a research object that would probably interest the state, not even as object of particular research field. The architectural research does not look like it has today a basis in the social environment, at least for as long as it can have a research for the medicine or the technology. Its award in the social field and its recognition from the scientific - research community should be in our opinion one of the main claims of architecture and architectural research today. Still, the architectural design research gives potential in the new architects for depositing proposals and for dealing with sectors of their scientific field that they are not easily given the possibility, such as the public space and the public building.
However, how do we conceive
the particularity of "architectural research", what are the questions
that it presents and what can be its tools?
For us, as we already have mentioned, design research in architecture means
that the architect owes to determine a spatial problem with social extensions,
to constitute his theoretical background and to seek bridges (theoretical
or not) with other cognitive fields. At the same time, it advances in a abstractive
spatial proposal with possibilities of development in the future, that however
maintain the force of abstractive thought, since it can also activate other
artistic or scientific fields, especially because it facilitates a multiple
conception.
When Pierre Levy uses the term of "virtuallity" he explains it as follows: "Virtuallity, is passage in a questioning, a shift from the particular to the open problem…" It speaks therefore for a action which promotes "the mesh of problems, the node of tendencies or forces that accompany a situation, an incident, an object or any other entity" and which "is led to a process of resolution: the activation, the passage in actualization". Lented this analysis of Levy for the "virtualization" we support that it can play a proportional role in the architectural research in the social level, as well as in the narrow limits of architectural practice: Architecture is certainly characterized by its practical value, the importance that it has to formulate architectural proposals that lead to a result and is attributed in use, its importance as solution of a problem, as "an actualization". But as important as problemsolving is, similarly important is to "define a problem". That it can open a "consideration field", present questions openly, define the problem. This means that through architecture someone can investigate sectors of wider questions of space, where they concern for example questions of public space, politics, social reality, culture. To look that way for "the network of problems, the tendencies or forces hub that connect a situation". As a result through this procedure the architect can state questions that concern and are interesting to the broader community and the research team and to earn a broader "reference network", that helps the defining of the position of the subject that it plans and in the relationship with social, political, cultural environments… this architectural research, from the beginning, includes both tendencies, in other words, to solve problems and to propose new ones, to "open" questions.
In a research for architecture the tools must be those that will create the theoretical structure, which will present the "open problem" and will be used as the start for proportional activities - resolutions. The tools therefore must act abstractively and can be of two kinds: a) notional tools, those that are proposing a theoretical problem and that everytime the architect can borrow from other knowledge fields (for example anthropology, sociology, philosophy, psychoanalysis) in the frames of the "reference networks" that we stated before, b) the abstract tools of the designing or maybe better stated, tools that can present and transfer meaning through the research fields in spatial terms (space maybe the most closely connected term to experience and therefore to knowledge).
One example towards the direction of the tools that can state spatial abstractive meaning is given to us by G. Deleuze through the statement of the term "diagram". According to him, the diagrams that are used from many for the meaning's proposal (mathematics, physics, economy, anthropology…), can be perceived as tools that contribute to the construction of a science, to the framing of its field. In an other part of his text it is referred as an abstract machine, vehicle for destabilizing and discovery. As the vehicle that can lead to other sectors of the knowledge procedure.
We are referring therefore, to a research that uses these special tools of architecture in order to provide solutions and to propose questions. It is a form of research that pays attention to the procedure, uses the planning and the knowledge of other fields. In general, we could include this kind of research in the internationally called research by design.
In a culture that is noticeable
for its detachment, architecture can bridge human experiences, to negotiate
the common meaning that organizes every collectivity. This is the social value
that architecture can have today: in the modern cultural environment of pluralism
and of multiple subjectivity, space can become the medium for common meaning,
the common experience that can organize the collectivity and can become the
common reference for all categories for the collective (the collective memory,
the politics, the culture…). This is what we believe that today justifies
a search of research uniqueness for architecture.
