The Architect and the Academy: Essays on Research and the Environment

This book is a collection of eleven short essays organised into two parts, one plotting the recent history of architectural education and research within academic settings and the other a particular strain of research related to environments. The essays, previously published between 1995 and 2017, are arranged thematically and bound together by an autobiographical thread.

The first four essays form a coherent group that focus on the relationship between the academy and practice as it developed primarily at Cambridge in postwar WWII Britain. These capture the author’s engagement with the academicisation of architecture as student and subsequently as practitioner and educator at the University of Cambridge.  Together the essays elaborate on the contribution of architects within academic settings to research through both practice and design studio instruction, and to the discipline via critical practice and critical commentary. Although the book is focused on developments in Britain and the environment of sense perception, many of the issues and debates recounted here will be familiar to those beyond Britain. It is Hawkes’ personal account and assessment of shifts in the relationship of practitioners to pedagogy during this period and the accompanying historical evidence of the value of design-based research that makes this history both engaging and insightful.

The initial essays highlight  some of the major questions that have vexed architectural education as it became primarily a university discipline in the mid-20^th century: in what way is architecture a discipline, how might the value of the design studio be demonstrated in the context of established methodologies of the humanities and sciences, what constitutes architectural research and, most importantly for Hawkes, what is the role of practice in establishing research objectives and methodologies?  Most who teach within university architecture programs will recognise the issues embedded in these questions and will have experienced at some point the friction between practice and the academy, their often-differing objectives, evaluation regimes, and aspirations. Some of the concerns raised by Hawkes’ reflective account of architectural education can be discerned in architectural thought at least since the Renaissance when design was elevated above construction and the distinction between design as representation and as material object facilitated an undermining of the medieval guild system (practice) in favour of a liberal arts basis (theory). A renegotiation of this division between craft and liberal art can be seen in the Bauhaus pedagogical proposal synthesising Werklehre (workshop/making) with Formlehre (form/ art theory) in the 1920s. These precedents, in differing degrees, recognised architecture as a work of materiality and object of experience and as a representation of an underlying idea or speculation. It is the negotiation of these two possible meanings of design as a representation of an idea and as the material object that allows architecture to be taught within the academy and contributes to the tensions between practice and pedagogy within an academic environment. The mid-20^th century zeal to replace apprenticeship with university instruction as the route to professional practice refocused the debates about design, the validation of its concepts, and its relationship to practice.  In Britain the 1958 Oxford Conference on architectural education was influential in transforming architecture into a more academic study with research in the profession given greater emphasis. This was  a turning point for British schools of architecture – and met with great resistance.Hawkes’ contribution is to highlight the potential of built form as well as studio design work to be considered a form of research and a means of advancing the discipline.

A reference point for Hawkes’ (p. 8) writing about architecture and its place within an academic structure is Leslie Martin’s 1958 proposition (made in Martin's report on the Oxford Conference) that:

“[t]heory is the body of principles that explains and interrelates all the facts of the subject. Research is the tool by which theory is advanced. Without it, teaching can have no direction and thought no cutting edge."

It is reiterated in some form in each of the first four essays (p.16, 22, 28 & 37). Hawkes tellingly amends this statement to refer to architecture as a discipline rather than a subject and to add critical practice to research as a tool for the advancement of theory (p.2).

The work of critical practice, an “activity in which projects were subject to agendas that extended beyond the circumstances of each individual project” (p.12), as opposed to ordinary practice (which does not) is central to the subsequent seven essays. These essays are arranged thematically and dedicated to the work of historical and 20^th century practitioners that serve as evidence of the symbiosis of research and critical practice within and beyond the university.  One of the stated aims of the book is to counter the diminished role and status of the academic practitioner who, Hawkes argues, has a role to play in offering critical commentary on design in addition to practice as a means of furthering innovation. These seven essays are themselves examples of such critical commentary on architectural projects that synthesise research on environmental aspects of building design with experience and precedent in innovative ways. Here, the environment is explored through an experiential consideration of climate, temperature, light, and sound. The examples, which range in date from the English Renaissance to the canonical figures of the  20^th century, function as a form of evidence for the persistent role of design as a form of research integral rather than preliminary to architectural innovation.

The collection of essays, which provide the history and evidence of design as a form of research, are enjoyable to read and offer purposeful insights into the exploration of environmental aspects of buildings and the masterful execution of a set of environmental responses at an intimate scale: the environments of ambient temperature, expressive illumination, and acoustic surround rather than the larger environment of sustainability or climate change response. The attentive analysis of form, materiality, and detail offers a discriminating revelation of the working of design informed by precedent and experiment in addition to building science. It is clearly this larger argument that matters here and perhaps explains certain editorial lapses: numbers embedded in plans bereft of a key or reference in the text, lack of orientation indicated on plans, illustrations that often appear as icons rather than additional visual information. The abrupt ending with no conclusion or summary comments lends the book a retrospective quality that is no doubt intentional, but one wishes that the intelligent, cogent and engaging elucidation of architectural research as it is evidenced in practice and projects of the distant and recent past had been extended to more current work and the altered environments in which it is produced. These are perhaps small quibbles.

The assembly of these essays into one coherent collection serves to demonstrate a consistent contribution of design practice to advancing the discipline, especially in its synthesis of science, precedent and imagination in responding to environmental demands placed on buildings. While each essay presents an interesting description of specific projects and their individual engagement with science and received disciplinary knowledge, the collection as a whole creates a cumulative effect of a pattern of thought, defining a discipline.  

The footnotes reveal an impressive array of publication venues in which the essays were originally vetted and published. These include Architectural Research Quarterly, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Further Studies in the History of Construction, Daylight and Architecture, The Journal of Architecture.  The research, examples and arguments presented in the essays have also been elaborated in his books. Collectively they are a testament to both Hawkes’ commitment to, and consideration of, design research and the role of the profession in the advancement of the discipline, especially in its addressing of the environmental aspects of design. Here, Hawkes himself can be situated as an exemplar of research and critical commentary.