Contribution au symposium en ligne The Practice of Architectural Research, 8-9 octobre 2020, session 2A "The Tools of the Discursive Practice"

Following architects at work from within the architecture firm, allows to describe architecture in the making, instead of studying their production once built and/or published and rather than relying on their established discourses. Such a pragmatist approach tends to provisionally eclipse what architects have to say about their work to emphasise material design operations. In order to question this tendency, this paper focuses on a process I observed during one of my fieldworks where words played a central role: the process that led the four founding partners of the firm to establish and communicate what they called their “values”, under the form of a short text which was to replace the “about” section of their website. Following this process within the firm, allows me to show how material it actually is: not only does it require many artefacts, visuals, materials, gestures, etc. besides words, but it is inextricably entangled with many other processes in which the architects take part at the same time, such as assembling portfolios and slideshows, evaluating and documenting past projects, as well as designing current ones and prospecting for future ones. I am interested in this particular process because my research investigates the forms that architects’ political or social engagements take within their daily practice, beyond the posture they might explicitly claim. I had chosen that firm because part of their discourse is precisely about favoring the practical and concrete aspects of architecture at the expense of theorizing what they do. Yet, once in the firm, it was impossible to ignore the time they were actually spending on discussing what they were doing and how to communicate about it, writing various forms of texts and constantly looking for the right formats and words. My activity as a researcher taking notes, making sense of what they were doing, and writing papers, was not so foreign to their practice as architects after all! Focusing on the making of their “values” allows to address my main hypothesis: architects’ engagements are not prior nor external to their practice and production. They are not prior intentions that end up formalised in their sketches, models, mockups, organisation, behavior, etc. They are rather themselves in the making through these very concrete things and processes. They are not merely made of a different material, such as ideas, words or attitudes. In a pragmatist perspective, values manifest themselves in what we care for, what we attempt to sustain; they are thus not abstract but observable. Values are not what explains architects’ work but what needs to be explained thanks to the meticulous depiction of what architects do and how they are made to do. This paper shows how practicing research within architecture firms doesn’t necessarily impose to choose practice against discourses but prevents from establishing any strict a priori distinction between the two, to rather consider a series of interconnected socio-material practices.