Research Projects

Leslie Martin and the Question of Architectural Knowledge

Adam Sharr

In a construction industry dominated by the mathematically-quantified professions of Quantity Surveying and Engineering, many architects are concerned with the 'knowledge base' of architecture, its parameters, and ways in which the authority of architects might be validated beyond the profession. However, inspired by critical and cultural theory, many academic architectural commentators have become deeply concerned about the very notion that architecture should have disciplinary boundaries, or indeed any sort of distinctive 'knowledge base' to call its own. Theory has indicated that not only established histories of 'high-art' building and 'great' practitioners, but also the notion of 'disciplinarity' and possibilities for any sort of architectural 'knowledge', remain potentially exclusive and invidious and should be treated with scepticism. In this context, it is particularly interesting that the late twentieth-century model of 'architectural knowledge' - which many practitioners are seeking to extend and many theorists seeking to question - remains quite scantily recorded.

In the UK at least, architecture is a relatively young academic discipline. The notion of 'research' and model of education which to some extent persist to this day were established by the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) at its Oxford Conference in 1958. Chaired by Leslie Martin, then Professor of Architecture at Cambridge, the conference served to consolidate the model of architectural knowledge which Martin was then establishing at his institution. Rooted in a Darwinian view of the 'progress' of design, that model was subsequently explored by architectural writers such as Lionel March, Philip Steadman, Peter Llewellyn-Davies and the young Christopher Alexander. It was proposed that design was objective, measurable research - its results to be quantified as data useful for designers - concerning ideal architectural form, building 'typologies', environmental performance and user response. Within this model, local authority offices were to be the laboratories of architecture, architectural journals the literature of the discipline.

This model had its detractors and did not hold sway for long. Its demise in the UK, precipitated by critics of professionalism such as Jane Jacobs and Bernard Rudofsky, was sealed by the wholescale transfer of practice from the public to the private sector in the 1980s. Martin-ian 'architectural knowledge' became a commodity vital to the sale of professional expertise; there was pressure to guard data rather than share it. The promotion of 'star' quality, likewise, became more important than a collaborative laboratory ethos.

The current research project aims to explore the rise and fall of the model of architectural knowledge promoted by Leslie Martin. A number of papers and a research grant application are in preparation. It is also hoped that a special issue of the journal arq will be published on matters around this theme, timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Oxford Conference in 2008.