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Guest Editorial

Understanding Architecture,Accounting Society

The special issue tackles two problems inthe STS eld: First, the gap o knowledgeon cities, urban networks, architecturaldesign and innovation in the STS theory,and second, the lack o dialogue betweenscholars who have explored urbanism withSTS tools but ignored architectural design,and those who pursued STS analysis o

design thinking without considering cities and urban change. Thus, thevolume explores the role STS theory canplay in urthering our understanding o architecture and cities: What does it meanto produce a socio-technical explanationo buildings, urban networks, designprocesses, city developments? Whatkind o conceptual tools are needed tounderstand innovation in architecture or

the dynamics o urban change, cognitionin design or the practices in the studio,cities as socio-technical phenomena orthe invisible urban networks that shapebig metropolises?

Science Studies have recently begunto tackle more explicitly questions o how space, locality, urban inrastructureand city development matter in theproduction o scientic knowledge.

Taking inspiration rom geography, urbanstudies and architecture, historians o science have drawn attention to theimportance o space to the credibility o scientic claims, and looked at thecity inrastructure and the architectureo various scientic buildings andlaboratories as socio-spatial settingsaecting the production o knowledge.This recent development in history o science included key publications

rom both historians o science and

geographers (Galison and Thompson,1999; Livingstone, 2003; Gieryn, 2006;Osiris 18 (2003); Osiris 19 (2004)).

The analytical potential o connecting STS and urban studies is not new. Looking back ten years or so we can nd calls or justsuch a marriage. What characterizes thisengagement is the desire or conceptualmeans to mediate the relationshipbetween the materiality o buildings andcities and the heterogeneous processes

and practices through which the builtenvironment is designed, developed,inhabited, redesigned, demolished,rebuilt and re-inhabited. Dissatised withreadings o the city that saw buildings asa mere backdrop or ‘theatre’ or socialinteraction, or alternatively, readings o city orm as determining social structuresand practices, these researchers desired amore relational understanding. Brain, or

instance, highlighted the need to unravel“what social relations, strategies o action,and possibilities or transormation arebuilt into cultural arteacts” (such asbuildings) (Brain, 1994: 216). Drawing upon STS, he encourages us to view architects as ‘engineer-sociologists’ who“dene both the characteristics o thearteact and the ‘social universe’ in whichit is to unction- (Brain, 1994: 198). Otherattempts o approaching urban andarchitectural issues with STS methodology ollowed: they investigated the invisiblenetworks that shape big metropolises(Latour, 1998), the town planning astechnology and the city as an ‘enormousarteact’ (Aibar and Bijker, 1997); urbanobduracy and change (Hommels, 2005);the ‘interpretive fexibility’ o sustainablearchitecture (Guy and Moore, 2005), thedierent actor-networks that under-pin

buildings and the complex negotiations

Science Studies 1/2008

Science Studies, Vol. 21 (2008) No. 1, 3-7

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in the process o design and development(Guy and Shove, 2000).

In spite o the ew attempts highlightedabove, STS attention is still rarely ocused

on the architectural practices or urbandevelopment. However, there appears agrowing interest o the STS community to the issues o urbanism, architecturaland urban design1. Certainly, recentconerences and workshops have witnessed this interest2, while somepublications in the architectural presshave also expressed an interest in STStopics and methodology 3. It is note-

worthy that these attempts to relate STSand Urban & Architectural Studies reliedto a particular sub-eld o STS – SocialConstruction o Technology (SCOT). Although the Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) has been largely used over thelast thirty years to understand science,expanding its methods to engineering design, technological innovation,medicine and economics by ‘ollowing the actors’ in their routine practices,accounting or their actions andtransactions in complex spatial settingsand unpacking the materialisation o the successive operations they perorm,it has been rarely used to account orthe production and consumption o urban and architectural arteacts, andor the change in the built environment.The architectural practice has or themost part escaped the attention o the

anthropologists o science (however see:Callon, 1996; Yaneva, 2005; Houdart,2006). In sum, there appears to be littledialogue between scholars who haveaddressed issues o STS & Urbanism (using mainly the studies o Large TechnologicalSystems or the Social Construction o Technology approach) and those whohave tackled architectural thinking anddesign processes using primarily the

Actor-Network-Theory.

Thus, taking as a starting point theassumption that STS theories are relevantor the analysis o cities, architecturaldesign, and urbanism, we propose to put

a variety o new or rarely addressed topicson the pages o Science Studies, and onthe STS agenda—architectural andurban design, buildings, urban networks,cities—and by so doing to also encouragea new dialogue between Architectural andUrban Studies, rom one side, and STS/ ANT, rom the other; a dialogue that, webelieve, will cross-ertilize the two elds.

The main themes presented in thisissue4

The contributions in this volumeare based on extensive eldwork inarchitectural oces or surveys o designand urban development processes andcover a vast range o empirical examplesand case studies, such as: the city o Kavala on the Balkans, the perspectivedrawings o the Japanese architect KengoKuma, the ‘surprises’ o a recalcitrantbuilding undergoing renovation in thecity centre o Vienna, etc.

Maria Rentetzi interprets thearchitecture o an early century industrialbuilding—the tobacco warehouses inKavala, Greece—as a powerul tool orconguring the identities o tobacco workers providing the means to tobaccomerchants to publicly present themselves

and their achievements. Drawing on thescience studies tradition that questionedthe multiple connections betweenarchitecture, spatial and materialarrangements o scientic buildingsand the particular types o scienticknowledge and identities that are being orged with architectural and urban tools(Galison and Thompson), Rentetzi seesthe warehouse architecture in a similar

ashion—as acilitating better productivity

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and generating specic identities. Sheconnects in a novel way the architecturalprole and spatial arrangement o thisbuilding type with the particular way

it acted as a natural mechanism oremphasizing the hierarchical dichotomy o private and public spaces, the relationsbetween skilled and unskilled workers,between the overseers and the overseen,between strikers and strike breakers.Industrial buildings, one can learn romRentetzi’s contribution to the volume,similar to science buildings, play anactive role in transorming identities,

setting divisions and exercising controland surveillance.Moore & Karvonen set out to explore

how STS analyses can be enrichedby epistemological debates in designstudies around the relationship o designto context. Drawing upon the work o planning theorist Bent Flyvbjerg, they identiy three modes or dispositions o design—context-bound, context-ree,and context-rich, which they exploreas design dispositions, each with adistinct technological rame that relatescommunities, individuals, designers andthe arteacts they design. They compareand contrast these three rames as ‘idealtypes’ o design thinking in relation totheir assumptions about individuals anddesigners, orms o knowledge, attitudesto truth, utures and technologies and soon, exempliying each rame with typical

construction practice—straw-bale,preabrication and design/build. Thesethree design dispositions, they argue,oer alternative ways or STS researchersto engage with the design o the builtenvironment. In particular, the context-rich disposition echoes the inclusiverelationship to users already amiliarin constructive technology assessmentapproaches and aims towards the co-

construction o urban utures. Learning

rom the work o designers working in a‘context-rich’ rame, the authors argue,could acilitate a more engaged STSpractice towards the built environment.

Drawing on the actor-network-theory,Sophie Houdart accounts design in themaking in the oce o the Japanesearchitect Kengo Kuma. Basing her ndingson extensive ethnography o this practice,Houdart shows architectural montages ascosmologies in the making and depictstheir production as a process o gradualshaping o new social worlds, which makepossible the cohabitation o a variety o

humans and non-humans. She sets someprovocative questions or architecturaltheorists—How do architects shape new worlds? What are the cosmologies they render and version in design?—suggesting that architectural design is also a complex work o testing and shaping new socialcongurations and cosmologies. A careulethnographical account o the minuteoperations o rendering, translating,computerising, and substantialising theperspective drawings guides us slowly towards a better understanding o thepractices o designing architects in thisJapanese oce. To render drawings indesign means, according to Houdart’sethnography, to render particularsocial worlds. I Rentetzi’s case showsconvincingly how the design o industrialbuildings is capable o shaping particularsocial identities, with Houdart’s case we

rather witness the specic micro-shaping o individualities at the level ‘pixellisation’,and observe how the nature o all thosebeings that populate the architecturalvisuals is redistributed through minusculedesign operations o matching, mapping and importing.

Using a similar ANT approach toollow design practices, Albena Yaneva investigates a building renovation case.

Like Houdart, she has spent entire years to


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ollow and account the practices and thevariable ontology o numerous humanand non-human actors involved in designand construction processes. As compared

to Houdart, whose ethnographicalobservation does not quit the practiceo Kuma’s oce, Yaneva engages in an‘outside-studio’ ethnographical survey o practitioners at work. Following theslow transormations o a building undergoing renovation and accounting some situations o ‘surprise’, she showsthat renovation, repair, and adaptationrelated design brings the social and

technical actors in one analytical view and reshufes them all together. ‘Surprise’points to an epistemology o the practiceo building renovation that entails all theparticipants to redene their knowledge,competences and artistry in the moment when the design routines are ‘breached’.Dismissing the traditional denitionso buildings as static backdrops o activities or as entities subservient to thelaws o technical causality, a building-in-renovation emerges as a ull-blownactor. That is, an anti-substantialisticunderstanding o buildings based on anobservation o what they do, i.e. on theirrepertoire o actions—docility, obedience,counter-actions and recalcitrance. Farrom being a passive material in thehands o preservationists and renovators,an intermediary that would transportmeaning without transormation and

would reiy the social, a building-in-design rather acts as a complex mediatorskillully redistributing the agency among human and non-humans, provoking contextual mutations and modifying thesocial meaning attributed to it insteado aithully transporting it through thecenturies.

A second special issue that developsthe same theme is planned by the guest

editors

Acknowledgements

The guest editors would like to thank JanFischer, editorial assistant or the special

issue.

Notes

1 Some articles in a thematic issue o the Journal of Architectural Education,“Technology and Place”, Spring 2001(edited by Steven A. Moore andKenneth Frampton) have ocused onSTS methodology as an interpretive

tool or architecture in North America,but have used mainly the researchmethodology o social constructivismto investigate the complex andconficted values o architecture. Twospecial Issues o Osiris, 2003 and 2004(Journal o History o Science) haveexplored recently the connectionsbetween history o science and urbanstudies, and history o science andmedicine and environmental history and geography.

2 “Transorming Spaces: The TopologicalTurn in Technology Studies”, 2002,Darmstadt, Germany; Special session“Doing Architecture, Accounting Society: Social Studies o ArchitecturePractices”, EASST 2002, York, UK; “The Artistry o Thinking like an Architect:Stories rom the Architectural Oce”,2005, Akademie Schloss Solitude,

Stuttgart, Germany; Session on “STSand the city”, 4S Society in Vancouver,November 2006.

3 See some recent publications in Grey Room and more specically Martin(2005).

4 Some o the papers included in this issuehave been presented and discussedat a special session, organised by theguest editors: at the annual conerence

o the British Sociological Association

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in April 2007 (http://www.britsoc.co.uk / e v e nts / Cone re nce .htm).This session entitled “Connecting Sociology to Architecture: Learning

rom STS” gathered scholars romdierent disciplines who have already undertaken research on architectureand urbanism rom an STS perspective. We beneted rom the comments o Proessor Bruno Latour who acted as adiscussant in the session.

References

Aibar, Eduardo & Wiebe Bijker (1997)‘Constructing a City: The CedraPlan or the Extension o Barcelona’,Science, Technology & Human Values22 (1): 3-30.

Brain, David (1994) ‘Cultural production as“Society in the Making”: Architecture asan Exemplar o the Social Constructiono Cultural Arteacts, in D. Crane (ed),The Sociology o Culture: Emerging

Theoretical Perspectives (Oxord:Blackwell): 191-219.

Callon, Michel (1996) ‘Le travail dela conception en architecture’,Situations Les Cahiers de la recherchearchitecturale 37 (1er trimestre): 25-35.

Dierig, Sven, Jens Lachmund & Andrew Mendelsohn (eds.) (2003) Osiris18: Science and the City (Chicago:University o Chicago Press).

Galison, Peter & Emily Thompson (eds.)(1999) The Architecture o Science(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press).

Gieryn, Thomas (2006) ‘City as Truth-Spot: Laboratories and Field-Sitesin Urban Studies’, Social Studies o Science 36(1): 5-38.

Guy, Simon & Steven Moore (2005)Sustainable Architectures: Culturesand Natures in Europe and North

America (Oxord: Spon).

Guy, Simon & Shove, Elizabeth (2000) A Sociology o Energy, Buildingsand the Environment: Constructing Knowledge, Designing Practice

(London: Routledge).Hommels, Anique (2005) Unbuilding

Cities. Obduracy in UrbanSociotechnical Change (Cambridge,Mass.: The MIT Press).

Houdart, Sophie (2006) ‘Desmultiples manières d’être reel – Lesreprésentations en perspective dans leprojet d’architecture’, Terrain (46): 107-122.

Latour, Bruno (1998) Paris, ville invisible(Paris: Les empêcheurs de penser enrond).

Livingston, David (2003) Putting Sciencein its Place: Geographies o ScienticKnowledge (Chicago: ChicagoUniversity Press).

Martin, Reinhold (2005) ‘Architecture’sImage Problem: Have We Ever BeenPostmodern?’, Grey Room 22 (Winter):6-29.

Mitman, Gregg, Michelle Murphy &Christopher Sellers (eds.) (2004) Osiris, Volume 19: Landscapes o Exposure:Knowledge and Illness in ModernEnvironments (Chicago: University o Chicago Press).

Moore, Steven & Kenneth Frampton

(2001) ‘Technology and Place’, Journalo Architectural Education.

Yaneva, Albena (2005) ‘Scaling Up and

Down: Extraction Trials in ArchitecturalDesign’, Social Studies o Science 35(6):867-894.

Albena Yaneva Manchester Architecture Research Centre,University of Manchester, UK

Simon Guy Manchester Architecture Research Centre,

University of Manchester, UK


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