Montage Driven Research Strategies: The Consolidation of Generative, Systematic and Analytical

Abstract

The relationship between design and research is a lively debate in our discipline. Ever since the first issue of the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) from 1947, this complex but extremely significant relationship has been increasingly questioned. This debate is also hardly unique to architecture, as Groat and Wang underline: “Some of the very same discursive positions are found in many other creative or professional fields, including the visual arts, product design, business and consultancy, planning, landscape architecture, and urban design, among others.” However, even after a broad array of studies undertaken by various scholars, researchers and practitioners, we are repeatedly trying to explain and properly understand this intricate relation. I take the stand that architectural design and research are mutually complementary, hence there is no architectural research without design, and there is no architectural design without research. Nevertheless, this does not mean that every process of architectural design is a priori research, to the same degree as not every research within the architectural discipline can be considered as architectural design. The two activities are not equivalent, they are fundamentally distinct, but they embody many complementary and overlapping qualities. I believe this exciting relationship is a focal point of contemporary architectural research, and in a wider perspective, it will substantially affect the path in which our discipline is developing. At the CA²RE / CA²RE+ DELFT: RECOMMENDATION conference, I presented a part of my research titled Composing Images: Architectural Montage as Design-Driven Research Tool. As the title suggests, this research project aims to thoroughly investigate the capacities of architectural montage in the design-driven research framework. The reason for this research derives from the fact that in architectural history and historiography, architectural montage has been mostly perceived as a purely representational technique, neglecting its other enormous potentials. However, with the development of the design-driven research framework, which focuses on the research strategies that are based on design procedures, montage potentially gained another, extremely important role. Therefore, the main hypothesis of the research is that architectural montage is not merely a representational technique, it is rather a research tool that is able to produce new meanings and new knowledge within the architectural discipline. As a starting point of the research project, an artistic design-driven research experiment was conducted through seven interdisciplinary phases. All seven phases of this experiment, which all together form a research methodology, included design procedures that were done by hand. Moreover, the whole design-driven research process was uncertain, non-linear, highly intuitive and empirical in nature. It consisted of very distinct operations, from collecting different types of images and constructing the digital atlas of the research, to selecting and hand-colouring images with a brush and watercolours. However, the core element of this process was architectural montage. As montage was present in various forms in all seven phases of the research, it emerged as a comprehensive layer of the whole experiment. Montage was not only employed as a main compositional and logical principle in design procedures, rather the combination and juxtaposition of elements was also used to deliver answers in the same way as any classical analytical method would. Therefore, architectural montage was applied as both design and research technique in the creative process. The implementation of design into research strategies brings architects back to the familiar territory. We are given a chance to use skills and abilities that we have finely developed through our architectural education and training. Design-driven research teaches us how to value design thinking and design methodology as research and represents the combination of intuition and science, as Kieran underlines: “Research brings science to our art [. . .]. To move the art of architecture forward, however, we need to supplement intuition with science.” As architectural montage is mainly a design technique, meaning it aims to “change existing situations into preferred ones,” this research showed how highly intuitive generative processes can consolidate with both analytical and systematic ones within the research undertaken in the architectural discipline.