Analysing Architecture

University of Dundee,
School of Architecture
Simon Unwin

Research background
Some fields of creative intellectual activity have long-established academic disciplines for
analysis. Historically, architecture has not. Research in architecture has tended to be
concentrated in the tangentially related fields of architectural history, critical theory and
architectural science. The first takes its methodology from art history; the second from
philosophy and literary criticism; and the third from science. There have been repeated calls
for architecture to have its own analytical methodology since the 1980s.

The intention of this project is to find what constitutes architecture, to identify and
understand its accumulated powers, and generally to produce an evolving descriptive theory
of architecture, similar to that which linguistics explores in relation to language and
musicology in relation to music. Architecture needs to establish its academic credentials as a
coherent subject of progressive research, in its own terms, as an underpinning to the
professional education and research standing of the subject at university level, and as the
basis of consistent criticism of architectural work in the public realm
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.

Research aims and objectives
This research aims to contribute to the understanding of architecture as a creative intellectual
activity, by developing conceptual frameworks for analysing examples. This will benefit
researchers, architectural students, practitioners and critics, and all interested in the ways
people situate themselves in the world and order their activities by means of building.

Main aims of this research are:

- To contribute to the understanding of architecture as a creative intellectual activity by
exploring and describing its workings through the thematic analysis of examples;

- To contribute to the continued development of analytical research in architecture as
an academic discipline.


Institutional structures / funding
The work is progressed under the aegis of CARA The Centre for Analytical Research in
Architecture in Dundee University. It has been supported with departmental funds, but
application has been made for substantial grant support.

Research methodologies / process
The research will follow traditional methods. Ideas in works of architecture are generally most
clearly represented in drawings plans, sections, elevations of the works the media usually
used in their conception, and the most reliable means of representing their actuality in
abstract form. Architectural drawings are therefore the key material for the proposed
research. Published sources will be searched for ranges of examples relating to the specified
themes. Plans and sections (and maybe elevations) of selected works will be redrawn this is
important to the process of assimilating the ideas they contain (as well as providing illustrative

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The field of architectural analysis is not completely new. It is founded on the work of pioneering
analysts such as Rowe (e.g. Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, 1947), Zevi (e.g. Architecture as Space,
1957), Rasmussen (Experiencing Architecture, 1959), Norberg-Schulz (op.cit. and other volumes),
though no consistent methodology has emerged. Other writers have also sought to put forward
frameworks for understanding or analysing architecture, for examples: Alexander (A Pattern Language,
1977), Ching (Architecture: Form, Space and Order, 1979), Clark and Pause (Analysis of Precedent,
1979), von Meiss (Elements of Architecture, 1986), Baker (e.g. Design Strategies in Architecture, 1989),
Hertzberger (e.g. Lessons for Student Architects, 1991), and Evans (op.cit. and Translations from
Drawing to Building, 1997).

material for publication). Selection of examples, by individuals and by group discussion, will
be based on the strength and clarity of the ideas they present, and the strands they add to the
growing frameworks for understanding the chosen themes.

Significant examples will be selected, through the above processes, for study visits with the
purpose of experiencing the works at first hand, and to supplement the research from
published sources with descriptions of examples in actuality, especially the experiences they
provide and the contexts in which they sit. At a technical level the purposes of the visits will
be: to check the accuracy of published drawings; to make additional measurements and
drawings if necessary; and to take photographs for illustrating publications.

Using the material collected the selected examples will be interrogated in team seminars
(applicants, RA and RSs) to draw out and assimilate through discussion the ideas they
contain. Broad frameworks of understanding will emerge from these debates. Collected
material will be organised to illustrate the frameworks that emerge, as the basis for the
published notebooks.

The research method must be open and inclusive. Bachelard
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describes an approach to
studying ideas contained in, or represented by, the products of creative minds that is
dependent on the researchers receptivity to ideas encountered in such products, and
consideration of what Bachelard, after Minkowski, calls their reverberation. The proposed
research takes a similar stance. It is teleological in that it seeks understanding of the
formative processes of architecture through analysis of ends examples of works of
architecture. It seeks what might be called the platonic ideas of works by studying them
through drawings, generally the medium of their conception. The research is also
phenomenological in that it supplements findings from study of the abstract medium of
drawing with direct experience of works in actuality. This combination, with the receptive
approach advocated by Bachelard, provides a full and open (non-prescriptive) way into
understanding the workings of architecture. The intention is to explore and describe
architecture as a creative, adventurous and poetic medium; it is not to prescribe a
methodology for doing it.

Research outputs / findings / contributions
Previous work surrounding this subject developed a conceptually multi-dimensional thematic
methodology for the analysis of works of architecture; one that recognises architecture as an
intellectual, adventurous and poetic discipline. The book Analysing Architecture begins a
description of the workings of architecture, which is seen as a long-term challenge to help
those involved in architecture understand the powers involved, the conditions within which
they operate, the means at their disposal, and the poetic potential of their work.





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Poetics of Space (1958)


Doorway in a Buddhist Monastery south of Shanghai
Image Simon Unwin




A 'place' by a doorway in Chania, Crete
Image Simon Unwin