BUILT

Is there any room left for the rare and precious artifice that the built may possess? Sarcastic as it may sound, the question denotes a crisis. Architectural design faculty are increasingly turning away from the activity of building toward other modes of work that fulfill the requirements of academic promotion. Articles, books, installations and exhibitions have become more secure routes to produce research, yielding the ironic question: why build? At the same time, architectural practices have less time and fewer resources for research and speculation.

Tacitly or explicitly, building in the most basic and bare sense can be a unique form of inquiry for architects. A building requires rigor in practice and conception. It is a repository, not just of questions, but also of responses that contain scholarship opportunities for designers, builders and/or inhabitants. How do we position this knowledge to shape critical discourses that engage processes, technological impacts, and other topics within the field? What are the philosophical interrogations and responses that “the built” offers?

With this issue we make room for knowledge and questions that emerge from the built. What are the particular and critical discoveries that can be garnered from a close relationship with the edifice and its conception? Does engagement with the social, cultural and economic forces actualized outside of the studio space, through the act of building, generate particular forms of scholarship? Can we simulate this mode of working in the academy? How does pedagogy consider the contingencies of building?

The research project includes the publication of ISSUE 75:1 on BUILT by the Journal of Architectural Education. Furthermore the research team has been conducting interviews on the subject of knowledge production through the BUILT that will be published at the issue.