Design Research in Architecture

Bridging a range of positions between practice and academia, this series seeks out the best proponents of architectural design research from around the world. These texts will be varied in tone and structure, and will discuss aspects including design method, visual representation, textual analysis, social processes, and strategies for action. The series is to be deliberately inclusive in order to encourage a novel and vibrant kind of approach for architectural research. Each of the books will contain a large amount of serious and innovative historical or theoretical research, combined with creative propositions realized through a mixture of drawings, models and textual analysis. It is the essential symbiotic interplay between these components which creates the framework for design research in architecture.

The precise working of the interplay of text and project in architectural design research remains a much debated and relatively unformed issue, and this is of course symptomatic of the conditions facing any newly emerging subject area. The broader questions and theoretical structures of design research have formed the basis of discussions in international refereed journals such as The Journal of Architecture, and there is undoubtedly more intellectual work to be done in such areas. But there is also the need to form knowledge and method through actual propositions, with these studies enabling their authors not just to explore, propose and reflect on their specific subject-at-hand, but also on the wider nature of design research in general. It is for this express reason that this series aims to publish as widely as possible a number of the very best outputs in the field of design research, to allow others to use them as exemplars or to take issue with them through reasoned critique. It is a fertile time for design research and this book series will act at the heart of these investigations and discussions.