BUILT

Architectural design faculty are increasingly turning away from the activity of building to other modes of creative work in order to fulfill the requirements of academic advancement. Articles, books, installations and exhibitions provide a more secure route to the production of research, while a daunting question emerges: why build? At the same time, the profession has less time and fewer resources for research and speculation, while, even more tragically, it has less time for making buildings. The usual rift between the academy and the profession seems less important than the lack of time dedicated to build and to construct knowledge from buildings. Understandably, some have tried to expand the field of building, as when Michael Meredith advocates that “we should claim a space for architecture that is neither a project metanarrative nor its atomization into individual buildings, but the old-fashioned idea of an ouvre or body of work.” Yet, tacitly or explicitly, building in the most basic and bare sense continues to be a unique form of inquiry. It requires rigor in its practice and conception, as well as in the scholarship that can emerge from the knowledge gained through its processes. A building is a repository of not just questions but responses; some by the designer, others by the builder or inhabitant, and uniquely so, some by the edifice itself. As scholars and architects, we consider an array of variables for thinking and conceiving projects, from cultural significance to economic or environmental conditions, from technology innovation to performance and constructability, from fictional narratives to dreamlike drawings. But how do these questions shift once a design is built? How do we evaluate our own built work to situate it within existing or emergent architectural discourses in order to share the insights we gain through our processes of building? What kind of scholarship do buildings generate? What is the philosophical body of work that the built offers?

With this themed issue, the guest editors would like to solicit Design as Scholarship and Scholarship of Design content that originates from architectural projects that have been built. How do we assess the value of the most basic of architectural activities anew? What are the research opportunities that only built projects provide? This an occasion for design scholars to reflect on their built work, create scholarship that situates those reflections within the context of broader built environments, and establish new directions for thinking about how to get back to buildings.