Research Redux

TA D 5 : 1 Research Redux I was about three years into my doctoral studies at Harvard’s GSD when three questions, or more accurately, three challenges to my work, were posed. For context, I was part of the initial wave of academic researchers and practitioners who were enamored with all things “smart,” particularly walls in whatever nominative designation rendered them as technologically advanced and functionally, if not formally novel: smart skins, intelligent facades, performative glazing, interactive surfaces, adaptive envelopes. Inspired by the cover of James Marston Fitch’s seminal text, American Building: The Environmental Forces That Shape It, depicting a building envelope as mediating the full sweep of environmental phenomena, I planned to develop a wall system to control all scales of heat transfer, thereby covering thermal, luminous, and acoustic behaviors—the ultimate smart wall. The first challenge came from one of my doctoral advisors in Mechanical Engineering who kept asking me what my hypothesis was. I thought he simply didn’t understand; in Architecture, we dealt with big ideas. The second challenge came from my doctoral advisor in Environmental Health, who kept pressing me on method. How was I going to determine the value of what I produced? What were my criteria? I thought he didn’t understand that true innovation lay beyond the bounds of the known and should not be constrained by the limits of measurable criteria. The third challenge lit the proverbial light bulb when I took an undergraduate course on Plato and the Socratic Elenchus and discovered my writing less than enthusiastically received. I expected to excel as I had in all of my previous classes in Architecture, but I was instead roundly criticized for my overly personal reinterpretation of Socrates’ argument. It was at that point I began to realize the argument I put forward as a thesis was but an empty vessel, a diversion to obscure that there was indeed no thesis. My entire approach was predicated on what I wanted to do, to make, and I justified the project by self-determining both the criteria for measuring the results and the ultimate value of the results. I was completely trapped in the closed circularity of my personal view. So I inverted my thesis: instead of technologically advanced smart walls, I shifted the smartness directly to the atmospheric physical phenomena that we had heretofore attributed to the walls. It was enough of a shift that the hypothesis and method were deemed acceptable by my circumspect advisors. While I am proud of the resulting thesis, it was only a first step toward a lifelong rethinking and reassessment of how our profession develops research questions, brings objectivity to its methods, and, most importantly, frames meaningful contribution. There have been many missteps and retrenchments along the way, and I am grateful to the intrepid doctoral students who hung in there with me as I tested and retreated from different methodological paths. The following observations look back over those decades and put forward several characteristics of how we approach research, particularly research that addresses the physical aspects of what and how we produce.