Charrette:essay Tales and tools: the Design Studio Brief in Architecture’s expanded field. Suzanne Ewing. Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, University of Edinburgh. ABSTRACT This essay argues that the Design Studio Brief establishes tacit disciplinary practices of architecture, as well as more explicit pursuit of topics of formulated relevance or concern. A series of tales of Design Studio Briefs from the fourth year of study at one UK Architecture School are sampled at dates which coincide with significant moments in Scotland’s recent constitutional history: the 1979 devolution Referendum, the 1997/1999 establishment of the Scottish Parliament, and the 2014 Independence Referendum. The tales are followed by a discussion on tools: towards means and practices which might inform the re-tooling of the Design Studio Brief and its ends. KEYWORDS design studio brief, disciplinary practices, architectural education Over the past forty years the field of global Higher Education economy. Allied to Architecture has expanded in scope and in the funding conditions which redefine national and potential of architectural design as subject and transnational educational responsibilities, what practice.1 Focus has shifted from site to field, educational capital is and what it is for, from static object to moving project.2 requires a refreshed ethical position.5 Preoccupations of Design Studios in architectural education have shifted from Euro- Architectural Design Studios are often known centric sites and artefacts deemed worthy of through their best student project achievements study, to a global field of competing and in professional body awards. There is less contested urban futures.3 As a discipline understanding of how they work: as collective defined through practice, it is increasingly at dynamic practice, as curricula narrative, in play in inter-, trans- and multi- disciplinary honing disciplinary skill and repertoire through domains.4 At the same time, architectural iterative and accumulative pedagogical tactics, education has expanded in scale as an as incubators and armatures of design research. attractive and profitable constituent of the Design Studio Briefs are rarely exposed, Charrette 3(1) Spring 2016 6 ISSN: 2054-6718 consistently archived or researched, yet are at The University of Edinburgh, and as Head fertile evidence of intended ends and means of of Architecture at Edinburgh College of Art, Architecture.6 Educators, as brief writers, where Architecture students had been taught establish both implicit and explicit fields of since the late nineteenth century. In 1955 he focus. While the conversational and de- split the posts, focusing on the Department of contextualized tone of many written briefs can Architecture at the University. He raised be dismissed as anecdotal, this essay proposes funding for a Housing Research Unit, that they are the thick data of architectural developed postgraduate work and attracted education and its scholarship,7 material excess international visiting lecturers such as Louis which bridges and reveals knowledge gaps Kahn, Nicolas Pevsner, Max Fry and Lewis between the big data fields of architectural Mumford.11 He continued to lead the School history, technology and visible products of until 1968. architectural design. They are generated by and for particular production practices: from T In 1958, Basil Spence’s office had plans on the square alignment to scale ruler measurement to drawing board for high rise housing at digital software. Further research into these Hutchestown, Gorbals Area C, Glasgow (built situated material practices might shed light on 1960-6, demolished in 1993). Robert Matthew the Academy as a site of emergent practicing Johnson Marshall’s Turnhouse Airport of architecture in its broadest sense. building outside Edinburgh had been completed in 1956. The 1950s were a busy era Tale: 0 (1958) for infrastructure construction in Scotland: Kincardine Power Station (1958-60); The 1958 Oxford Conference on Architectural Hunterston ‘A’ (1957-64); Rothes Colliery, Education is often used as a datum for Fife (1957); the Forth Road Bridge (1960-64). accounts of architectural education in the UK.8 A Comprehensive Development Area, This event institutionalised the education of an envisaging a megastructural redevelopment for architect in University, over the pupillage the whole of the University area was planned model of apprenticeship at an established for Edinburgh from 1962, prepared by Percy architectural firm. The Conference sought to Johnson-Marshall.12 More publicly consolidate a means of producing scientific disseminated architectural histories foreground research in architecture and the built autonomous jewels such as St Peter’s College, environment to advance theory in the subject.9 Cardross (1959-66), currently in ruins and the This predominant retreat into the Academy locus of a highly publicised 2016 site-specific aligned with a particular model and body of public art project.13 research which solidified UK postwar professional practice. Tale 1: +21 (1979) Preoccupation with inter-disciplinary design John Hedjuk and Roger Canon published dialogue and discourse was a thread of the Education of an Architect: A Point of View in ‘Conference on Design Methods’ held in 1962, 1971, based on a decade of work of the US focusing on systematic and intuitive methods Cooper Union School, as a catalogue for an in engineering, industrial design, architecture exhibition of student work shown at the and communications, launching design Museum of Modern Art New York. Education methodology as a field of enquiry, with an of an Architect Volume II consolidated another emphasis on civilian research, decision-making decade of work, as framed by John Hedjuk, techniques, and teachable doctrine about the Elizabeth Diller, Diane Lewis and Kim design process. In defining what he means by Schkapih in 1988. Peggy Deamer notes that design as a discipline, Nigel Cross notes, the weighty and voluminously illustrated ‘there are forms of knowledge special to the volume ‘displays a pedagogy that is, despite awareness and ability of a designer, its visually powerful projects, largely opaque independent of the different professional and unexplained’.14 Deamer notes the domains of design practice’.10 singularity of the pedagogy of Volume I with origins in traditions of European formalism, From 1953 to 1955, Robert Matthew (1906- but detached from European cultural 1975) held posts as the first Professor of embeddedness and social origins, and later Architecture in the new Department of from the currents and debates of postmodern Architecture/ School of the Built Environment thought. A relatively hermetic positioning Charrette 3(1) Spring 2016 7 ISSN: 2054-6718 towards developing self-critical, reflective practice, at MIT’s Study and Research in Education 1968-1992. His oft-cited work on the Design Studio was published by the RIBA in 1985. In considering design as a discipline, Nigel Cross describes Donald Schön’s work as seeking ‘an epistemology of practice implicit in the artistic, intuitive processes which some practitioners do bring to situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and value conflict’.16 The limits of Schön’s model, heavily based on cognitive theories of learning, have been observed by Helena Webster, who suggests ‘educators need to engage more with other theories of situated knowledge, action and learning’ such as those promoted by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger.17 A 1979 Edinburgh University Experimental Design Workshop, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, took place with nineteen architecture students (four female, fifteen male) returning to their final (fourth) year of undergraduate education after a year out in practice.18 They were joined by six architect practitioner group leaders, including architect, Isi Metzstein, three consultants drawn from Department staff, critic Alan Colquhoun, and a group advisor/ facilitator.19 The resulting Figure 1: The Anatomy of a Teaching Experiment document carefully describes the pedagogy, (1980) Printed publication. Now housed in the elevation, plan and section propositions and University of Edinburgh Art and Architecture Library, reflective evaluations by participants of this Edinburgh. ten day exercise to design an Extension to the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh. The focused on ‘abstract design operations’. For ‘Design Programme’ for a contemporary Deamer, Hedjuk’s pedagogy offered a museum, specifically the Decorative Arts paradigmatic line of architectural resistance to Department included a full schedule of the functionalism of modernism. quantitative accommodation required for Galleries and Storage, Laboratories, Education In the Fourth Year Design section of Volume Areas, Library, Staff Rooms, Catering, II, Diane Lewis introduces the studio as having Services and Administration, with Drawings to ‘…entered the subject of the City with be at 1:200 scale. determination to arrive at an architecture embodying the essence and possibility of A motivation for this workshop was stated as Place, challenging convention with new the erosion of ‘the effectiveness with which programs, new conceptions of site, structure, learning by doing is conducted in schools of and materiality, with a re-commitment to 20 15 architecture’, cited as stemming from the Social Contract’. A series of projects, detachment of practitioners from the academy. working with the laboratory of the ‘Island of Workshop leader, P.G. Raman, notes that the