Visual Research Methods in Architecture

This book offers a distinctive approach to the use of visual methodologies for qualitative architectural research. It presents a diverse 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 critical visualizations, which employ observation and sociocultural critique through visual creations texts, drawings, diagrams, paintings, visual texts, photography, film and their hybrid forms in order to research architecture, landscape design and interior architecture. The visual methods intersect with those used in ethnography, anthropology, visual culture and media studies. In presenting a range of interdisciplinary approaches, Visual Research Methods in Architecture opens up territory for new forms of visual architectural scholarship. Front Cover Half-title Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Introduction: Visual research methods and ‘critical visuality’ Part I – Drawings and diagrams: Disciplinary seeing and knowing 1. Is the plan dying? 2. Analogical Images: Aldo Rossi’s Autobiografia Scientifica 3. How to draw a line when the world is moving: Architectural education in times of urgent imagination 4. Drawing as being: Moving beyond ways of knowing, modes of attention and habitus 5. Learning to see: Otto Neurath’s Visual Autobiography 6. Duration and anexactitude: What is at stake with data-based urban drawing in research? Part II – Photography: Presence and positioning as a researcher 7. Looking at photographs: Thinking about architecture 8. Architecture’s discursive space: Photography 9. Desert Cities 10. Visual methodology on display: Taking photographs of Separation 11. Visaginas: Looking at the town through photography 12. Writing with pictures: Reconsidering Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas in the context of architectural scholarship, education and Google Images Part III – Film: Affinities and appropriations for researching contemporary culture 13. Next to nothing: Psychogeography and the ‘film essay’ 14. Ciné-Cento: Eisenstein’s visual methodology and the space of film 15. Constructing an architectural phenomenography through film 16. An animated portrait of Casa Malaparte: Filmic practice as design research in architecture 17. Exploring, explaining and speaking in tongues: Visual scholarship and architectural education 18. The plasmatic image: Experimental practices between film and architecture Part IV – Miscellaneous mixed modes and new media 19. Visual agency: Participatory painting as a method for spatial negotiation 20. ‘just painting’: Performative painting as visual discourse 21. Visual heuristics for colour design 22. Digitally stitching stereoscopic vision 23. Audio-visual instruments and multi-dimensional architecture 24. Kaleidoscopic drawings: Sights and sites in the drawing of the city Notes on Contributors Index Back Cover

This book offers a distinctive approach to the use of visual methodologies for qualitative architectural research. It presents a diverse 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 ‘critical visualizations’, which employ observation and sociocultural critique through visual creations – texts, drawings, diagrams, paintings, visual texts, photography, film and their hybrid forms – in order to research architecture, landscape design and interior architecture. The visual methods intersect with those used in ethnography, anthropology, visual culture and media studies. In presenting a range of interdisciplinary approaches, Visual Methodologies in Architectural Research opens up territory for new forms of visual architectural scholarship.

This book uses visual research methods to investigate architecture, landscape design and interior architecture. It presents a diverse selection of interdisciplinary approaches for the architect or architectural researcher to use their gaze as part of their research practice for the purpose of visual literacy.