Epistemologies of Making: A Theory of Craftsmanship for Architecture (2025)

Knowledge in the Making. On Production and Communication of Knowledge in the Material Practices of Architecture

2013

This article discusses some conceptual frameworks and notions used in, or with the potential to further develop, theories and understandings regarding the specific processes and forms of knowledge in creative practices of architecture, design and art. More articulate conceptual frameworks are not only of importance for strengthening disciplines and practices, but can also make valid contributions in wider societal contexts in relation to contemporary challenges in built environments. With the point of departure in the notions “material practice” by Stan Allen and “making disciplines” by Halina Dunin-Woyseth, theoretical frameworks and approaches by, for example, Andrew Pickering, Nigel Cross, Albena Yaneva, and Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari are discussed. The contemporary world has brought challenging societal developments and complex transformations of built environments, but new tools have also enabled other forms of design experiments, including non-verbal languages and various model worlds. The article argues that we must constantly study the contemporary situation, but also reflect upon our means of designing and production, as well as our forms of working and collaboration. New relationships between theory and practice, between research and practical designing, between academia, architectural practice and different actors in society, must be articulated and established through conscious strategies.

Making, Thinking, Knowing Architecture. Notes on Architecture as a Making Discipline and Material Practice

When Architects and Designers Write / Draw / Build / ?, 2013

Coarse epistemes: Skill, craftsmanship and tacit knowledge in the grit of the world

Perspectives on Tacit Knowledge in Architecture, 2023

In the words of Dutch archaeologist Maikel Kuijpers, craft is “a way of exploring and understanding the material world”. This definition suggests that craftsmanship can be understood as a touchstone for a theory of knowledge in material productions. By exploring the role of skill in the processes of making and its epistemic correspondence, I develop the hypothesis that craftsmanship is as a perceptive-cognitive enactment within the making process, a form of attunement with production. The argument is that the material, productive side of work deploys and operates a particular epistemological regime, based on types of practical engagement deeply related to the possibilities and contingencies of objective, concrete reality. Making means implicating oneself with the material world, embedding the body in the processes of transforming matter and partaking in the flows of forces that form things. Thus, the knowledge in the making – skill – can be understood as the invention or establishment of a new mode of perception through action that is enacted by tools, movements, techniques etc. This practical perception acts as the foundational basis on which craftsmanship is performed, representing its conditions of possibility. Given the perceptual, embodied nature of craftsmanship, its transmission is rendered impossible outside the actual engagement with production. As such, this interpretation refers back to the original distinctions made by Gilbert Ryle of “knowing that” and “knowing how” that influenced Michael Polanyi in his definition of tacit knowledge. The particular epistemic rationality of crafts provides insights for understanding knowledge inside disciplines involved with creative practice, such as architecture. The epistemic coupling with production helps to understand how architects design, but it also reveals a general epistemic schism in the discipline, founded in the inconsistency between abstract designerly knowledge and the craftsmanship of construction.

Craftwork as problem solving: ethnographic studies of design and making

2016

Trevor Marchand – currently Professor of Social Anthropology at the School of African and Oriental Studies – has spent a long career in studying craft development, organisation and transmission in different cultures. He has conducted fieldwork with craftspeople in Yemen (minaret building and apprenticeship practices), Mali (the work of masons in Djenne) and East London where he qualified as a fine woodworker at the Building Crafts College. This collection of readings – arising out of a workshop held at Plymouth College of Art in 2013 on problem-solving in craftwork – covers a vast range of domains including glassblowing, horse training, bicycle repair work, videography, furniture and ceramic production, building conservation, dressmaking and weaving, and explores some fascinating philosophical, cultural and ethical aspects of the multi-faceted nature of craftworking in contemporary times.

Making as Growth: Narratives in Materials and Process

Design Issues, 2017

As an activity, research through design gives rise to new knowledge from both creative processes and, if there are any, resultant artifacts. Arguably, all creative practitioners are researchers of one kind or another, whether through materials, aesthetics, technologies, ethnographies, or cultural theory. It also can be argued that research methods in creative practice have not so much been invented or applied to validate academic integrity, but instead they have unfolded and emerged as enquiry has deepened. In this way, the design researcher has the means to re-position their projects to frame premeditated research questions and objectives within their work, and in some cases, apply research questions after practice has taken place.

The Place of Knowledge in Construction

In this paper I explore shifts that I perceive in the control of the intellectual capital of construction as it relates to materials, to products, to processes and to organization. I think this should be a fruitful area of research for construction history. I believe that the last hundred years have witnessed a wholesale move of intellectual capital away from the demand side of construction, those who control the decision to build, and towards the supply side, those who respond to that decision and do the building. Construction knowledge Knowledge is an important instrument of modern global capitalism; indeed economists and sociologists talk increasingly of living in a knowledge economy. 2 This economy challenges traditional concepts of identity and authority that explain the roles of actors in knowledge related activities, including construction. A significant social and cultural side effect of the shift I am examining is the marginalization of some actors in construction whose traditional authority derives from technical knowledge, particularly architects and engineers, who have hitherto been important instruments of the demand side and who have often been mainstays of construction history. I will now outline the process by which this shift in knowledge has happened. Construction knowledge results historically from the evolution of strategies for building. 3 In order of appearance these strategies have been: Trial and Error-the innate and the instinctual Copying of whole structures-collective experience, ritual Copying of parts using rule systems-abstract systems of order, aesthetics, memory, learning, collective success and failure; tacit knowledge of technique Explicit prediction-rules based on science (materials, structures, calculation), aesthetics, theories; tacit knowledge remains but the organization of resources is in the hands of professionals serving decision makers

Narratives of Making: thinking practice led research in architecture

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Teaching construction thinking in architecture through materiality and craftsmanship

Structures and Architecture - Bridging the Gap and Crossing Borders: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Structures and Architecture (ICSA 2019), July 24-26, 2019, Lisbon, Portugal, 2019

In the field of architecture education design thinking today is often focusing on the powerful tools of modern technology. This comprises both the increasing technological possibilities in construction and materials allowing for more complex and tolerant structural performances and the broader geometric modeling tools which not only reduce formal limitations but also call for complexity with distinctive parametric translations of any given shape. Especially the teaching of design thinking is increasingly connected to growing technological opportunities, options and visions rather than to limitations. This tendency has intensified when even architectural and constructional models are no longer build but printed omitting the only part in standard design practice which is inherently connected to the process of making. The natural translation process of a formal geometrical idea into a physical object, once incorporated in the design process as a matter of course, strongly guides the design itself. This paper presents examples of teaching construction thinking in architecture through materiality and craftsmanship to architecture students at ETH Zurich. Focusing on simple tools and basic principles students explore material systems such as natural timber, simple glulam, or ferrocement without reproducing traditional techniques but to extend their experiences to possibilities of architectural expression and structural effectivity. This has been done in different cultural contexts in mixed groups with students of other schools to also discuss different approaches of dealing with materials in construction and different scales. Four different cases will be discussed in depth to reflect the potential of experimental design and the empirical study of forms and forces.

“Making: The Paragon of Knowledge”

This paper will look a tradition in Western philosophy that is sympathetic to a conception of knowledge, which is amenable to the truth claims of practice. Proceeding through an examination of a tradition, beginning with Aristotle’s analysis of the kinds of knowledge represented by techne and phronesis (or practical wisdom), the paper will examine the thought of the eighteenth century Neapolitan theorist Giovanni Battista Vico, in particular his reassertion of the significance of phronesis in the context of the overwhelming impact of Cartesian method. The paper will finally concentrate on the contribution of two major tinkers whose work progresses this tradition, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Aristotle pointed out that someone “knows a thing scientifically when he possesses a conviction arrived at in a certain way, and when the first principles on which the conviction rests are known to him with certainty”. Thomas Kuhn develops this idea when he asserts that, “normal science... is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like”. It is this idea that Heidegger addresses when he says that: “the mathematical” or scientific “project... is the anticipation of the essence of things, of bodies; thus the basic blueprint of the structure of every thing and its relation to every other thing is sketched in advance”. In this regard he critiques science’s fore-projection onto the real. This paper presumes that research in the visual arts should reflect the nature of those arts, their processes and purposes. The knowledge claims of the arts and particularly the fine arts are often compared in less than favourable terms to those of science, a phenomenon reminiscent of an earlier historical moment outlined by Gadamer, when “the human sciences’ claim to know something true came to be measured by a standard foreign to it – namely the methodical thinking of modern science”. The contemporary manifestation of this phenomenon is the cause of considerable anxiety within the still emerging culture of practice based and practice-led research in these fields. This phenomenon for both Gadamer’s and Heidegger might be regarded as being due to a kind of category error, because as Heidegger in particular asserts, those aspects of truth that emerge from each discipline differ according to the ontological status of the nature of their enquiry. In Being and Time, Heidegger argued that ‘the kind of care that manipulates things and puts them to use... has its own kind of knowledge’. Gadamer develops this point further in asserting that the human being is fundamentally concerned with action, application and service. He or she is primarily a doer and a maker, concerned with their environment and predisposed to intervention. With regard to the question of knowledge, the human being is not merely concerned with establishing “what is”, rather as “an active being”, his or her more primal concerned is with “what is not always the same but can also be different”. This paper outlines how in this tradition knowledge embodied in creative praxis represents in epistemological terms a paragon.

Forming Knowledge - On Architectural Knowledge and the Practice of its Production

How do we actually produce knowledge in the field of architecture and what kind of knowledge is it? According to Michel Foucault -an idea elaborated by Gilles Deleuze -all knowledge is about form: anything we can have knowledge about has a form -or is given form in the production of knowledge. Architectural design gives form; it is about conceiving a unity from a set of contradictory requirements, factors or demands. Architectural design, with its strong connection to social, economic and political factors, could produce new knowledge by giving spatial form to existing but elusive forces of different kinds -it can freeze, give form to diagrammatic conditions and makes use of forces in specific situations -and also explore and