Visual Methods in Architectural Research

This book offers a distinctive approach to the use of visual methodologies for qualitative architectural research. It presents a diverse, but not comprehensive, selection of ways for the architect or architectural researcher to use their gaze as part of their research practice for the purpose of visual literacy. Its contributors explore and use, what we term, ‘Critical Visualisations’ which employ observation and socio-cultural critique through the creation of visual texts, drawings, diagrams, paintings, visual devices, photography, film and their hybrid forms. The book positions these in relation to visual methods practiced in ethnography, anthropology, visual culture and media studies. It aims to present a range of inter-disciplinary approaches which open up territory for new forms of visual architectural scholarship.

The visual is understood as always connected with our embodied experience. The experience of architecture is a multi-sensorial one involving our bodily perception of space, engaging all of our senses. In order to design, architectural practitioners produce a range of visualisations that capture some of these. The representation of future reality requires that the visual is used as part of the architect’s repertoire in working with spatial, material and temporal conditions. However, because illustrated textual exposition is the most common method of producing and disseminating scholarly research, it is less common for architectural researchers to produce exploratory visual, aural, tactile or oral visualisations of their research – whether static or moving image - or to explore language and text as visual material. In the context of architecture’s shift from fixed object to moving project and with practice-based and design research gaining momentum in architectural scholarship, there is now a need to define sensorial research methods for architectural scholarship so as to redefine the visual, vision, and ways of looking at and seeing architectural research.