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Date: 07 March 07Author: Simon Unwin Email this Article Click to Print

Kathryn Findlay leads new design research unit

Kathryn Findlay of Ushida Findlay Architects has become Professor of Architecture and Environment in Dundee University. Kathryn has set up a design research unit within the School of Architecture; it is called Field: architecture design research. The unit is concentrating on design-led research, mainly through live projects and postgraduate studentships. The aim is to bridge the divisive tension that commonly afflicts schools of architecture – i.e. that between teaching and research – and bring the focus firmly back onto what should be any school of architecture’s prime concern – the quality of architectural design.

Ushida Findlay Architects came to prominence in the 1990s with internationally acclaimed designs in Japan such as the Truss Wall House (1993), the Soft and Hairy House (1994) and the Kasahara Amenity Hall (2000). Her Doha Villa (2002, photograph) took the ideas of non-orthogonal space and elegant shell-like form, that had emerged in the Truss Wall House a decade earlier, to new levels of sophistication and subtlety. In Britain, Findlay’s designs have included Grafton New Hall (2003), which, though not built, influenced government planning guidance on new houses in the countryside, and a Poolhouse in the Home Counties (2004), which, in reinterpreting the traditional material of thatch, blends her sensitivities to ‘vernacular’ Japanese and British architecture to produce an engagingly poetic intervention in a delicate context. In the Puerta America Hotel in Madrid (2005), alongside (or sandwiched between) contributions from eighteen other international architects (including Zaha Hadid, John Pawson, Norman Foster, Arata Isozaki, David Chipperfield, Oscar Neimeyer…), Kathryn Findlay designed the 8th floor as a flowing composition of white curving forms.

Field:architecture design research brings Professor Findlay’s talent and experience right into the heart of the school of architecture in Dundee. Taking on live commissions and competitions it offers the potential for exploring a variety of research agendas through the methodology of design. Field:adr currently has projects in Lancashire and London, as well as in Scotland. Kathryn’s current personal research, within Field:adr, is focused on reinterpreting ‘vernacular’ materials and craft techniques in exploring the creation of new formal morphologies. This research extends a line of enquiry established with her earlier Poolhouse, and exploits the complex geometric potential of traditional and sustainable materials such as thatch to produce sensuous curving forms. Research in Field:adr is also extending Professor Findlay’s long-term research interests in complex curvilinear ‘shell-like’ forms and associated explorations of non-orthogonal space configurations and innovative construction technology. Key issues in this research include: overcoming the problems of compound curved concrete construction; the use of digital technology as a design generator; the complementary virtues of high-tech and craft-based construction technologies; and the development of new procurement methods for construction. A third strand to Professor Findlay’s research involves issues of sustainability and environmental design. While she was teaching in the school of architecture in Tokyo Kathryn developed notions of conceptualising and visualising sustainable architecture that broke free of conventional expectations. It was this work that produced the ‘Kasahara Community Centre’ in 2000; in Dundee it is developing further to generate new forms for ecologically sensitive architecture.

Field:adr is essentially a workshop for research pursued through the medium of design. It is exploring design methodologies, particularly those that exploit advances in computer software. But with its studio embedded amongst those of the architecture students, Field:adr is also a locus for undergraduate and postgraduate tuition. Field:adr offers opportunities for senior undergraduate students to contribute to live projects, working closely with Professor Findlay, and for postgraduate students to pursue MPhil and PhD theses through the medium of architectural design. Combining live projects with teaching, research with architectural design, Field:adr is a factory for ideas.

Since the days of Margaret Thatcher ‘research’ has been the ‘prime directive’ for all disciplines in Universities. But during the last twenty years in schools of architecture it has often seemed that ‘research’ (the research recognised in the government Research Assessment Exercises by which University funding is set) can involve anything but what should be the prime concern – the quality of architectural design. Architectural science and history have long been acknowledged as fields for research, but architectural design, until recently, has been excluded. This has meant that schools of architecture have stretched themselves to continue the design teaching to which they have always been committed, but at the same time tried to build strengths in research areas that, though important, are only supportive or tangential to architectural design itself. But if in philosophy an argument or proposition is ‘research’, and in music a composition is ‘research’, then, in architecture, design should be too. Architectural design is, after all, a matter of argument, proposition and composition expressed not in words or musical notation, but through the language of architecture. Amongst all this, Field:adr is not only providing a factory for ideas, but also addressing a problem that has afflicted schools of architecture for two decades.