What knowledge can studio-based inquiry reveal that may not be revealed by other modes of inquiry? How is such knowledge acquired, and expressed? While these questions are never explicitly articulated in the architecture studio setting, they remain central to the mechanics of architectural education. This essay will attempt to engage these queries.

 

More than inspired dreaming, the mainstay of studiobased inquiry is material thinking, that is, architectural ideas arise in, and through, sustained and reflexive handling of materials, methods, tools and techniques – ink, graphite, paper, cardboard, wood, paint, glue, computer-modeling software, freehand drawing, drafted lines, and old-fashioned model making.  The knowledge which comes through a deep understanding for these modalities and their processes is what Barbara Bolt calls ‘tacit knowledge’, a knowing which is ‘neither merely perceptual nor rational’ but grounded in its own logic and modes of seeing.¹ Bolt argues that ‘the new’ emerges through our handling of the world, via the discipline’s specific modes of expression, these acting as levers to gain a new kind of ‘sight’: ‘Martin Heidegger terms the kind of “sight”, through which we come to know how to draw, to paint, to dance or to write, circumspection. For Heidegger, it is through circumspection that the “new” emerges. In this way artists gain access to the world, in what Emmanuel Levinas terms, an “original and originary way”. “Originary” is a term rarely used, but one that seems particularly pertinent to practice-led research. It is a way of understanding that derives from, or originates in and of the thing in question. In this case, the “thing” in question is practice. It is understanding that originates in and through practice’.²

​​

In architecture’s case, it is through drawings, models and their exegeses (analytic discourse and writing, for example, this essay) that the emergent idea is given substance, or following Bolt and Heidegger, that the idea originates. At the same time, Paul Carter emphasises that ‘material thinking’ is a lot more complex than the mastering of techniques and tools. It must involve invention.³ The wit of invention is fundamental and particular to studio-based inquiry but oft-times discredited as an idiosyncratic trait rather than an intellectual act. As Carter points out: ‘… applied disciplines, (such as) architecture and design, find they can describe what they do on condition that they leave out invention. Because of “the lack of credibility given to the vital processes of design and creativity … scholarship and research in these fields, where it does occur, is ‘about’ them, rather than ‘of’ them”’.⁴

 

Here, Carter highlights something key to studio-based inquiry. When architecture is discussed or written, it is discussed on the basis of what it is, as a finite object, rather than the sum of its possibilities, or of the trajectories pursued and those left behind. It means that if we engage the premises of material thinking, its tacit knowledge, ‘sight’ and circumspect ‘logic’ will affect, and fundamentally alter, the way we think about architecture, manifest its possibilities, conduct research, discuss, and write it. It means that the kinds of hesitations and non-linear routes taken in the act of design should find their way into the final work, albeit in how and what we choose to draw, construct, or discuss: ‘Hesitate comes from the Latin haesitare, meaning to stick fast, to stammer. It is a momentary holding back in doubt, a difficulty in doing or making something. In our age of aggressive digital imaging and atrociously hasty construction, hesitation must be brought back into architects’ drawings to make them truly heuristic devices’.⁵

 

Instead of being papered and smoothened over, the difficulty of making a choice should drive the inventive action of design. This is akin to Heideggerian circumspection, or what Thomas de Quincey calls ‘third apprehension’, which de Quincey argues, constitutes the very basis of intellectual discourse, ‘… all reasoning carried out discursively is mediate, that is discurrendo – by running about to the right and the left, paying the separate notices together, and thence mediately deriving some third apprehension’.⁶ 

​​

Design, like intellectual reasoning, is also subject to the nonlinear structures of thought and action. It requires a ‘third apprehension’, or an instinct. And this kind of circumspect instinct is, in its own way, comparable to intellectual work – by its weighing of possibilities and potentials, and its capacity to argue for a course of action not yet discernible to the mind nor visible to the eye. Yet, studio-based inquiry cannot operate like intellectual discourse, which preferably adopts a distant and objective perspective. Studio-based inquiry is an embodied discourse. This means the practitioner is positioned within the field of his or her research. The architecture student or architect is thus proximate to his or her subject – the site, the client, the programme, or the form of intervention. There is emotional investment. Arguably, without such investment, no worthwhile design process may be sustained. In this sense, architecture is inescapably fleshy, bound as it were, to the lived body.

 

The architectural concern here is not with an abstract sense of the body but what is anthropocentric, that is, ‘what it means to be “embodied” and to live in our animated and metamorphic existences as the concrete, extroverted, and spirited subjects we all objectively are’.⁷ While architecture has always been concerned with the human body, this body has also been reduced to the barest minimum, if not sometimes amputated of its specificities. As an architect laments, ‘I think it’s one of the things that is part of the criticism about the way that architects are trained – they don’t have a complex body in mind when they’re designing’.⁸

​​

Occupations rehearses various modes of inhabitation, subject-to-subject/object engagements, usage, habits, rituals, pursuits, obsessions, and routines, structured around the configurations of architectural space. The term ‘occupations’ is immediately visceral, temporal, and territorial. It deals with particular subjects – in this instance, the architecture student and his/her object of investigation. It delineates patterns of conduct, reciprocation, the production of space, and that of architecture.

 

The pages following this essay see projects from second year architecture students who were given the task of expressing a complex ‘subject’ within an architectural space. Each exercise, whether dealing with geometric abstraction, anthropomorphic manipulation or programmatic arrangement, was geared towards an exploration of architecture’s capacity to imagine, create and suggest modes of occupation – temporary or permanent, obvious or elusive, legitimised or contested – pertinent to the students’ elected subjects of inquiry. The notion of ‘subject’ needs some unpicking here. ‘Subject’ encompasses many dimensions. It refers primarily to the ‘client’ or occupant of which the space is designed for. It references this occupant’s physical and bodily needs, but also considers states of mind, emotions, and socio-political issues woven around this figure. Depending on whether one is dealing with a leisure fisherman, a blue-collar foreign labourer, a whitecollar expatriate worker or a streetwalker, the parameters for design shift dramatically with these distinctly different ‘fleshy’ subjects. At each point, architecture must respond to its occupant.⁹ 

​

Can one ever design for a specific subject? The answer would be negative only if we assume that all design is ultimately objective, and for the ‘greater good’. In fact, design is always subject-specific, even if this ‘subject’ is not explicitly articulated. At the same time, the question subsumes the inherently partial nature of the designer’s engagement with his/her subject. For as much as the ensuing architecture accommodates the subject, it also reveals something very precise about the designer’s relationship with this subject. How does the design process embed, and express, such a relationship? How does the designer make productive his/ her hesitation towards the subject such that these difficulties shape the design process, and become fundamental to the design’s genetic code?

 

The first set of projects by Cheng, Ho, Goh, Xu, Oh and Phoaw (Figs.10.0-15.7) explore the expressions of structure and occupied space in a series of off-shore fishing platforms or kelong. Each student began by working through the ordering principles of a chosen artwork, transforming these into an architectural order particular to their individual readings of the space and activity in question – a fishing facility located just outside rapidly urbanising Singapore, to provide for the introverted and solitary act of fishing. The artworks were pre-selected to conform to the site’s outward atmosphere – the sea as a ‘field’ of sameness but inherently varied and complex. 

​

Cheng’s control and feedback system of mobile steel frames and floating drums (Figs.10.0-10.6) allowed for the kelong to be altered both by the predictable six-hourly tidal variations, as well as the less predictable wave movements. Various spaces, activities and views expand, or contract, depending on the time of day, the tides and the moods of the sea. The effect is poetic and precise, engineered yet spontaneous.

 

In contrast, Ho, Xu and Oh’s structures (Figs.11.011.3,13.0-13.3,14.0-14.4) use the artwork as a means of defining what it means to fish alone in the open sea. The patterns in the artwork are transformed, through the imposition of the lone human body, resulting in atypical but calibrated spaces for fishing and resting. In these schemes, the focus is on how a strict formal manipulation through repetitive yet varied modules may reciprocally suggest new ways of inhabitation – for example, challenging the programmatic divisions of rest and activity, or the specificity of an architectural element such as a column or a step which may become structure, storage and space at the same time.

 

Goh and Phoaw’s schemes (Figs.12.0-12.7,15.0-15.7) straddle the formalistic interpretation of the artwork and the vicissitudes of the site, with equal attention being paid towards the structural invention of the kelong as occupied space. In both, there is obvious aesthetic fidelity to the artwork. Goh’s nod to Ad Reinhardt’s composition (Fig.12.0-12.7) results in a series of spatial cores holding the occupational functions of fishing and resting, but in themselves reliant on a hidden web of structural supports extending deep and far into the sea bed. The imagery of Goh’s structure may be influenced by the sea’s infinite and mysterious depths as is Phoaw’s whimsically titled Pollocks and Barnacles (Figs.15.0-15.7). In the latter, the structure is mirrored at the interface of sea and sky, the upper section to be inhabited by the fisherman and the lower by aquatic barnacles. This structure is imagined as being slowly transformed through use and growth, organic processes which change the architecture through different forms of ‘encrustation’. The resultant architecture is a network of labyrinthine, filigree and solid structures, some essential, others redundant, but the latter becoming progressively essential as these are occupied by their respective inhabitants in ways not completely determined by the designer.

 

Located within the neighbourhood of the present exhibition, the next series of projects explores the intricacies of living in the complex cosmopolitan setting of Geylang, arguably Singapore’s last few remaining enclaves. Liberated from the strict urbanised patterns prevalent in other parts of the island state, intense commerce, vibrant culture and notyet-gentrified inhabitation, are still found in Geylang. The students were asked to identify, or introduce, ‘the foreigner’ within this cacophonic context. The second set of projects by Seow, Cheng, Phoaw, Hossain, Koh and Goh (Figs.16.021.5) investigate difficulties of assimilation, avoidance, negotiation, and exclusion between different subjects living in this area, and how architecture can, or cannot, engage such complexities.

​

Seow’s project (Figs.16.0-16.3) creates space for the Filipina white-collar single woman worker. Translating the typological patterns of the Filipina house, it proposes a communal space centred on cooking and gardening. The single-storey architecture has a roofscape completely given over to a community garden planted with food crops. Though unassuming, the architecture is radical in its openly agrarian disposition, which outwardly challenges Geylang’s unyieldingly hard urban fabric. The blue-collar construction worker, a member of a rapidly expanding community in Singapore, is the subject of both Hossain and Koh’s schemes (Figs.19.0-19.3, 20.0-20.2). Drawing on habitual patterns of usage and rituals, such as the use of alleyways for socialisation, and the perception of openness between individual spaces, each scheme defines a legitimised space for the foreign construction worker while also opening the city to this marginalised group. Phoaw’s observation of Geylang led to a rethinking of housing for its streetwalkers (Figs.18.0-18.9). Cognisant of the subject’s complex ethical concerns, the project strives to improve the inhabitants’ quality of life, and to return some control, normalcy and integrity to this oppressed and over-compromised group of city dwellers. It transforms the shophouse typology into a large-house format, to be shared between occupants in a sort of cooperative living mode. The basic spaces are calculated to the barest minimum dimensions for each occupant, and then consolidated within a shared arrangement so that there is a large expanse of space, otherwise unaffordable to the individual occupant. While the overall architectural form is extremely simple and controlled, tectonic expression and careful spatial manipulation offer varying levels of privacy conducive to living and retreat, away from prying eyes.

 

In comparison, Cheng’s low-cost housing for ‘Study Mothers’ (陪读妈妈) and their children (Figs.17.0-17.6) thrive on the lack of privacy as its design generator. The term ‘Study Mothers’ refers to a group of mothers who migrate to another country for the sake of their children’s education. Often, these mothers struggle to support themselves and their children, choosing to take on types of work lower than their qualifications. This results in uneven working hours and inconsistent family time. The scheme builds positively on such parameters. Its spaces are modeled around the psychology of play, fundamental to a child’s learning, while also ensuring constant surveillance by available mothers who care for the cooperative’s children on a rota basis. Mothers are given space to congregate and socialise and children take advantage of the different functional spaces which double up as ‘play’ structures.

​

​Goh’s ‘Reinventing Suburbia’ (Figs.21.0-21.5) contests the perception of Geylang as an alienating and unsafe place to live. The design is for a student hostel. It caters for the foreign teenage student who is studying in Singapore, living alone, and living away from home for the first time. The project models the spatial tensions of a suburban landscape in order to provide a semblance of safety and enclosure within an essentially hostile urban environment. Using a ‘suburban kit of parts’ and the methods of counter-surveillance, the design also reveals a hidden side of Geylang, which is more accommodating and less inimical than what is commonly perceived.

 

To a certain extent, these limited studio-based inquiries test what architecture can, or cannot, do. The jury is still out on this. Nevertheless, practice-based research generates ‘personally situated knowledge and new ways of modeling and externalizing such knowledge while at the same time, revealing philosophical, social and cultural contexts for the critical intervention and application of knowledge outcomes’.¹⁰ In this way, the studio-based inquiry, free from the economic pressures of professional architectural practice, distinguishes itself and its purpose. In the end, architecture must remain elusive, maintain its ideals, encompass complexity, be delightful, useful, sturdy, but above all, be occupiable.

 

‘The tracing that architects do on the flatlands of drawing paper, what has it to do with the act of building? What makes these flat sheets relate with what we finally call architecture? Nothing: different matter, different dimensions, other substances and materials, Do we label architecture the stones, the bricks or the inks on the paper? Conceivably, neither the stones nor the inks are architecture. Rather something that escapes us: beautifully vague traces of factures that we can only grab through drawing daily tracings of lines’.¹¹

​​​

Notes

¹ Barbara Bolt, ‘The Magic is in the Handling’, in Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, eds. Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (London: IB Tauris, 2010), p.31.

² Ibid., p.30. Emphasis mine.

³ Paul Carter, Material Thinking: The Theory and Practice of Creative Research (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004), p.7.

⁴ Catherine Bull, ‘Dilemmas for creative staff in a research active faculty’, in Innovations: Arts-Media-Design Symposium, Number 2, 24-26 May 2002, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, p.1, cited in Ibid., p.8.

⁵ Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing: Slow Food for the Architect’s Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2011), p.68.

⁶ Thomas de Quincey, Select Essays, ed. A. Masson (Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 1888), p.137,  cited by Carter, Material Thinking, p.5.

⁷ Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p.1.

⁸ Frascari, Eleven Exercises, p.80.

⁹ See Jonathan Hill, Occupying Architecture: Between the Architect and the User (London: Routledge 1998).

¹⁰ Estelle Barrett, ‘Introduction’, in Practice as Research, p.2.

¹¹ Frascari, Eleven Exercises, p.60.