To obtain an overview of methods employed by scientific research conducted on buildings, cities and their inhabitants. Although an exhaustive overview is outside the scope of this course, participants will acquire a general sensibility for how methods ‘operate’ as technical tools of discovery and learn to apply a general framework that will allow them to decipher the workings of any method, independent of methodological tradition or convention. The skills developed through the semester work will aid in the writing of the state of art of one’s own method(s) and in examining other methods that are commonly applied to their object of research.
This bi-weekly lecture course will combine an hour of lecture with an hour of discussion on a selection of methods employed by research in architecture and urbanism. These include methods from both qualitative and quantitative traditions as well as those that are somewhat novel in their fields of application—Digital Humanities, Research as Design and Urban Data Sciences. The course will thereby focus less on such conventions and the types of judgments they produce about inventive modes of inquiry and more on a general model to address any method as a technic or, with regard to the work of Michel Serres, as an informational motor, which constitutes a ‘reservoir’ of data (or accounts, axioms, measurements etc.) and ‘processes’ its contents in a formalized and systematic way.
Course participants will develop a state of the art for the chapter of their dissertation where they will present their methodology. The precise content and form will vary from participant to participant depending on where they currently are in their doctoral studies, but the semester work should enable each participant to advance in the definition and articulation of his or her methods.
TISS
This seminar is a companion course to Technics and Invention: Exercises in Methodical Thinking. Although participation in the seminar course is not obligatory, the two are complimentary, with weekly lecture topics corresponding to the methods covered in the other course. Each course will alternate weeks and be held in the evenings. Language of discussion and semester work will be in English.