“Everything we know derives from language, where this latter derives from music. Nothing surprising, therefore, in finding this latter at the origins of geometry or of arithmetic. … From noise emerges the music from which emerges the language from which knowledge emerges. … A canonical genealogy, preserving the monopoly of the sayable, whose line follows the soft, in the direction of the little energies.”
—Michel Serres, Statues
This course seeks 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 addressing any method as a technic, which constitutes a ‘reservoir’ of data (or accounts, axioms, measurements etc.) and ‘processes’ its contents in a formalized and systematic way. Each lecture will profile a different method or series of methods, presenting some of the trends apparent in their application in architecture and urbanism, while also picking up on larger questions they pose for adjacent disciplines or the philosophy of science.
This lecture course is a companion to the seminar course Technics and Invention: Exercises in Methodical Thinking. Although participation in the seminar 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.
