Exploring socio-material orderings in ethnography of architecture

How can the socio-material assemblages involved in contemporary ‘doings of architecture’ be identified and studied? The paper discusses recent transformations within architectural design practice and the extended network of local actors and technologies mobilized in contemporary building construction. Interested in examining how the current requirements in the field are – and can be - handled in architectural production, we aim to contribute to the ongoing development of ethnography of Architectural Design (Yaneva 2008, 2009, 2012). In our research, we focus on recent requirements that are recognized to cause displacements – some of them deliberately installed to do so - in established architectural practice: The attempts to regulate and homogenize project-information in digital 3D/4D-models from very early stages of the planning; the manifest tendency of involving an increased number of actors in all stages of the building-process, and finally the increasing demands for documentation – 'evidence' – of the choices made over the course of the planning, in terms of issues like economical consequences and parameters for ‘sustainability.’ The paper will present empirical examples of planning in contemporary architectural design. We attempt to follow the actors in detail through their socio-material involvements and ‘architectural inventions’ such as visualized motives of space, materials, atmospheres, buildingparts and -components, and to explore how relations continuously tie and untie as a means to serve the new requirements. The aspiration is to produce concepts that unfold socio-material orderings and actor/processes involved in architectural becoming.