Situating Knowledge in Archiscape: A Traveler’s Guide

Where do architecture and research coincide? Is there a potential intersection at all between architectural and scientific practice? Could the academic ‘doctorate’ offer a ‘thinkable’ and fruitful crossing point? Rather than trying to define such a meeting point in positive terms, this paper attempts to outline an epistemological terrain in which to locate these questions. Travelling through the length and breadth of this terrain requires certain sacrifice, certain heuristic effort, of which, from an architectural point of view, the reconsideration of both luggage and objectives might be the most radical. Throughout the criss-crossing of this expanse, two basic arguments will unfold; two projected directions for a ‘thinkable’ architectural knowing. The first one suggests a disjunction of architecture from the disciplinary and object-related towards the discursive. This reorientation takes as its point of departure a literal understanding of discipline as a strict regime with a given, objective reference; and a corresponding comprehension of discourse similarly in the literal sense as the actualisation of possible standpoints. The second argument consists of a redirection also of discursive knowing, from the establishing of a detached and abstract ‘thinkability’ to a practical mapping of the thinkable as a social and political expansion; a successively unfolding -scape