This collection introduces, illustrates, and advances fresh ideas about creative practice inquiry in architecture. It concerns architectural knowledge: how architects can use their distinctive skills, habits, and values to advance professional insight, and how such insights can be extended to make wider contributions to society, culture, and scholarship. It shows how architectural ways of knowing and working can be mobilised as tools for research. Collected here are a series of creative practices that emerge out of architecture and actively engage with other fields and methods reaching across the academic landscape. Architectural inquiries collected in this book probe matters that lie beyond the obvious expectations, the conventions, the default, of the discipline. Drawing, borrowing, adapting, dramatising, perhapsing, monstering, experimenting, cartooning—the tools and methods of each inquiry vary but they all share a common outward gaze, engaging architectural ways of knowing with other disciplines and practices including the arts, biological sciences, ethnography, and technology. Chapters gathered here offer insight not only into incipient modes and tools of architectural research, but emerging ethical, practical, and philosophical positions intimately tied to the creative practices involved. Setting-out the idea of creative practice inquiry in architecture, this innovative volume offers a lively and resourceful contribution to a growing body of work on design as research. It will be of interest to: students keen to pursue architectural ways of thinking and writing; practitioners who want to use their distinctive professional abilities to contribute to architectural and scholarly knowledge; and academics and doctoral candidates keen to engage with the burgeoning scholarly field of design research.

Architecture manifests as a space of concealment and unconcealment, lethe and alêtheia, enclosure and disclosure, where its making and agency are both hidden and revealed. With an urgency to amplify narratives that are overlooked, silenced and unacknowledged in and by architectural spaces, histories and theories, this book contends the need for a critical study of hiding in the context of architectural processes. It urges the understanding of inherent opportunities, power structures and covert strategies, whether socio-cultural, geo-political, environmental or economic, as they are related to their hidescapes – the constructed landscapes of our built environments participating in the architectures of hiding. Looking at and beyond the intentions and agency that architects possess, architectural spaces lend themselves as apparatuses for various forms of hiding and un(hiding). The examples explored in this book and the creative works presented in the interviews enclosed in the interludes of this publication cover a broad range of geographic and cultural contexts, discursively disclosing hidden aspects of architectural meaning. The book investigates the imaginative intrigue of concealing and revealing in design processes, along with moral responsibilities and ethical dilemmas inherent in crafting concealment through the making and reception of architecture.

This book explores the growing field of bio-design through interdisciplinary creative practice. The volume illustrates a range of experimental working techniques while offering a foundational understanding of lab practice principles. The book highlights the myriad of opportunities presented by microorganisms that have reshaped the planet and made it habitable. The book provides an account of the creation of living materials from the point of view of an architectural design practitioner. The transition from traditional design practice to laboratory investigation is captured, highlighting strategies of creating partnerships across a range of fields. The book demonstrates laboratory methods and ways of investigating the development of living materials and celebrates the growing body of practitioners, scientists, activists and anthropologists who are reimagining new strategies for addressing contemporary environmental challenges. Designer's Guide to Lab Practice looks at ways in which integrating living components with needs of their own would not only help offset the environmental impact that we have on our planet but could also create a closer relationship with nature. It is a working manual as well as a guide to emerging practitioners seeking to transition into a field that is yet to be defined and that offers the promise of a new era of human habitat making as a direct response to the looming ecological crisis.

This volume explores connections between architecture and theatre, and encourages imagination in the design of buildings and social spaces. Imagination is arguably the architect’s most crucial capacity, underpinning memory, invention, and compassion. No simple power of the mind, architectural imagination is deeply embodied, social, and situational. Its performative potential and holistic scope may be best understood through the model of theatre. Theatres of Architectural Imagination examines the fertile relationship between theatre and architecture with essays, interviews and entr’actes arranged in three sections: Bodies, Settings, and (Inter)Actions. Contributions explore a global spectrum of examples and contexts, from ancient Rome and Renaissance Italy to modern Europe, North America, India, Iran, and Japan. Topics include the central role of the human body in design; the city as a place of political drama, protest, and phenomenal play; and world-making through language, gesture, and myth. Chapters also consider sacred and magical functions of theatre in Balinese and Persian settings; eccentric experiments at the Bauhaus and 1970 Osaka World Expo; and ecological action and collective healing amid contemporary climate chaos. Inspired by architect and educator Marco Frascari, the book performs as a Janus-like memory theatre, recalling and projecting the architect’s perennial task of reimagining a more meaningful world. This collection will delight and provoke thinkers and makers in theatrical arts and built environment disciplines, especially architecture, landscape, and urban design.

Architectural drawings and models are instruments of imagination, communication, and historical continuity. The role of drawings and models, and their ownership, placement, and authorship in a ubiquitous digital age deserve careful consideration. Expanding on the well-established discussion of the translation from drawings to buildings, this book fills a lacuna in current scholarship, questioning the significance of the lives of drawings and models after construction. Including emerging, well-known, and world-renowned scholars in the fields of architectural history and theory and curatorial practices, the thirty-five contributions define recent research in four key areas: drawing sites/sites of knowledge construction: drawing, office, construction site; the afterlife of drawings and models: archiving, collecting, displaying, and exhibiting; tools of making: architectural representations and their apparatus over time; and the ethical responsibilities of collecting and archiving: authorship, ownership, copyrights, and rights to copy. The research covers a wide range of geographies and delves into the practices of such architects as Sir John Soane, Superstudio, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Frank Lloyd Wright, Wajiro Kon, Germán Samper Gnecco, A+PS, Mies van der Rohe, and Renzo Piano.

Many developed nations face the challenge of accommodating a growing, ageing population and creating appropriate forms of housing suitable for older people. Written by an architect, this practice-led ethnography of retirement housing offers new perspectives on environmental gerontology. Through stories and visual vignettes, it presents a range of stakeholders involved in the design, construction, management and habitation of third-age housing in the UK, highlighting the importance of design decisions for the everyday lives of older people. Drawing on unique and interdisciplinary research methods, its fresh approach shows researchers how well-designed retirement housing can enable older people to successfully age in place for longer, and challenges designers, developers and providers to evolve their design practices and products.

This book addresses one of the most exciting and innovative developments within higher education: the rise in prominence of the creative arts and the accelerating recognition that creative practice is a form of research. The book considers how creative practice can lead to research insights through what is often known as practice-led research. But unlike other books on practice-led research, it balances this with discussion of how research can impact positively on creative practice through research-led practice. The editors posit an iterative and web-like relationship between practice and research. Essays within the book cover a wide range of disciplines including creative writing, dance, music, theatre, film and new media, and the contributors are from the UK, US, Canada and Australia. The subject is approached from numerous angles: the authors discuss methodologies of practice-led research and research-led practice, their own creative work as a form of research, research training for creative practitioners, and the politics and histories of practice-led research and research-led practice within the university. The book will be invaluable for creative practitioners, researchers, students in the creative arts and university leaders. Key Features*The first book to document, conceptualise and analyse practice-led research in the creative arts and to balance it with research-led practice*Written by highly qualified academics and practitioners across the creative arts and sciences *Brings together empirical, cultural and creative approaches*Presents illuminating case histories of creative work and practice-led research