DESIGN AND RESEARCH

A recent article in Architect quoted Jérôme Chenal, a Swiss architecture professor: “Design is not research, that is just speculation . . .” Exactly so. For years I have heard design studio teachers maintain that what they do with their students qualifies as  research, and that it is an injustice that it is not recognized by the rest of the university as such. But Chenal is correct, design is speculation, not research. There is no real feedback. I suppose if a design were built and evaluated it might qualify as a sort of research, but studio work remains on paper—or, rather, on the screen. Feedback, in the form of the comments of critics, is a function of taste rather than performance data. The same is true in the profession. The practice of architecture is ill-suited to research—clients do not expect to pay for experiments, they want buildings that work. This is not to belittle design, but rather to distinguish it from research. When Charles and Ray Eames laboriously developed a technique for heat-forming wood laminations into three-dimensional shapes, that was research. When they produced the DCM chair, the “potato-chip chair,” that was design.