It is a continuous challenge to convert artistic development activities to a research effort that can be raised to a general, theoretical level that reaches beyond artistic production. In the field of architecture, Associate Professor Peter Bjerrum at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture has worked with artistic development activities as academically acknowledged research. In October he defended his doctoral dissertation, 3 Fortællinger om Arkitekturens Grundlæggelse (3 Tales About the Founding of Architecture) and thus became Denmark’s first doctor of architecture.

By Mads Nygaard Folkmann

By studying three dimensions of the foundation and nature of architecture – extent, form and material – the dissertation presents three tales about what makes architecture … architecture. The key method applied in the dissertation is to take the architectural work and use it as a basis for further systematic and methodic processing. Together, the works and the theoretical reflections provide a new understanding of the founding of architecture.

In the statement from the evaluation committee, the dissertation is defined as “artistic research”, which springs from “specific architectural experiences” and thus has to meet four criteria:

1. The experimental and artistic process is the necessary basis for the achievement of new insights. The research efforts must take practice, not theory, as their point of departure.
2. Artistic research is separate from ordinary work processes by being “subject to a method and a systematic approach”.
3. Tacit insights must be made discursive and communicable to enable them to be debated and challenged by others.
4. The articulated reflection must be of a systematic and generalising character.

The considerations concerning the character of research implied by these criteria are highly pertinent to design research. This was debated at the DCDR’s Research Rally August 2007, among others by the rector of the Schools of Visual Arts at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Mikkel Bogh (who was also a member of the evaluation committee for Peter Bjerrum’s dissertation). Here, the research criteria were also addressed in the general discussion about quality in design research.  

MENHIR, tower, wall, gate. Exhibition, Meldahls Smedje, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, 1996. Photo: Planet

Hence, from a design perspective it is also important to view the approach and method applied in Peter Bjerrum’s dissertation as a contribution to the ongoing discussion concerning how the field of design should relate to artistic development activities and research.

Point 1: Using the Work as the Point of Departure

In his dissertation, Peter Bjerrum links work and reflection, letting them support and expand one another. The challenge was to create a framework of reflective consideration about the works’ “tacit statements”, while still maintaining the focus on the particular quality of any specific architectural/artistic research, which is that it uses the architectural work as its point of departure.

Thus, the foundation of the dissertation is constituted by three different architectural objects, which have all been exhibited in Denmark. Each in their way, the three objects thematise and address an architectural issue, and as a crucial point, the resulting statements are not primarily conveyed through language but are instead expressed in the spatially extended medium of architecture. Precisely because architecture carries statements that appear unutterable when measured in relation to language, it is essential to carry out one’s exploration on the specific terms of this medium. In this sense, the three projects, MENHIR, Chora and Glass’enClosure, each express a unique dimension of particular architectural experience:

• As a work, MENHIR (Celtic for monumental monolith) addresses the way in which architectural objects, by force of their extent, can define a particular site, which is determined by point, line and surface.
• Through its structural character of a hollow space, the project Chora (Greek for space) addresses the ability of form to create space, which can be put to the point in a cross-reference between form and space: Form creates a particular space, and this space has a particular form.
• Glass’enClosure thematises the founding of architecture based on its material character. In an interplay between the materials of plaster, faux marble (plaster mixed with glue) and glass, the project reflects on the founding of architecture as a relationship between matter and tectonics, i.e. the way in which matter breaks, folds, curves and fractures.

Peter Bjerrum explains: “You can approach architecture from a theoretical or a historical angle, that’s a matter of comparison. My angle is that in any case, it’s the work that comes first, and that consequently there’s an important point in examining architecture’s own statement as work before drawing parallels to any theoretical, historical perspective. As I see it, it’s a matter of getting inside architecture through its own statement.”

Glass'enClosure. Exhibition, Meldahls Smedje, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, 1999. Photo: Planet

“Architecture is, after all, not a product of an analytical idea but rather of a synthetic idea that produces, creates – if you will – the object of its own production, its own analysis. But it’s also important to emphasise that architects work with tangible things, that architecture is an activity that is bound to specific media. This undoubtedly implies a political statement about claiming architecture research as an independent discipline, which establishes its own research paradigm based on actual works and its particular media.”

Point 2: The Systematic Character

The dissertation’s systematic character lies in the fact that the examination based on architectural objects is not random but rather combines three different views of the way in which architecture organises human perception of the world.

“I incorporate three different perceptions of the way in which architecture approaches space. They constitute different views on architectural space and different narratives about the founding of architecture,” says Peter Bjerrum.

“In the MENHIR project, Celtic for a monumental monolith, I study the relationship of architecture to place and extent. In the Chora project, Greek for space, the key issue is the relationship between space and form. In Plato’s dialogue Timeaus, chora is the receptacle in which the world was shaped; thus, the point is how shapeless space assumes a shape or, in the words of the German philosopher Heidegger, ‘that which is occupied by what stands there’. And finally, in the project Glass’enClosure, I study space as being one with matter. Actually, it’s not the case that there is first a vacant space, and next it is occupied by objects. Rather, space – including architectural space – should be seen as included in matter and its tectonics.”

The systematic character of the dissertation also rests on the fact that it defines a path from work to thinking.

“The three projects represent certain aspects of the founding of architecture, its ontological dimension if you will. But only to the extent that it rests on the works that were produced and on the subsequent examination and presentation. It is in this process from work to thinking that the methodical approach to the artistic activity is developed. It is also in this process that the work unfolds as a narrative, becoming a general theoretical and historical discourse about the founding of architecture,” says Peter Bjerrum.

Point 3: Discursive Generalisation

The challenge for a project of this nature lies exactly in rendering the insights inherent in the project’s artistic studies discursive, so that they can be communicated to others and thus be a part of the ongoing scientific dialogue.

Chora. Exhibition, Meldahls Smedje, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, 1999.  Photo: Planet

As the evaluation states, “the crucial strength of the dissertation [...] lies in the presentation of a method for architecture research as artistic development activities, which on the one hand acknowledges the sovereignty of the creative experiment while also defining a systematic approach to opening this tacit experience up to a discursive field that is capable of articulating the acquired insights on a high theoretical and scientific level.”

Point 4: The Openness of Reflection

Hence, it was the works that guided the process of generalising the narrative about the founding of architecture that Peter Bjerrum addressed.

Peter Bjerrum explains: “The individual works constitute the foundation of the dissertation, and the fact that as a synthetic, artistic statement they form their own inner consistency means exactly that they cannot be contradicted outside their own universe. They are, so to speak, an isolated statement that one will have to attempt to break open from the inside.”

“The key is to allow the work to generate thinking, i.e. to use the works as a means of exploring history and theory in order to provide the artistic work with a scientific basis. This of course also implies a set limit for the systematic procedure; the approach has a built-in weakness, as its main focus is on finding the references that enter into dialogue with the works. But this is a weakness that is compensated for by the artistic and scientific precision of the architectural statement, and which also offers a certain discursive openness: It leaves room for others to introduce their own references and thus unfolding further reflection,” says Peter Bjerrum.

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Peter Bjerrum’s doctoral dissertation, 3 Fortællinger om Arkitekturens Grundlæggelse (3 Tales About the Founding of Architecture) is published by the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture. It si available in Danish only. At the diploma ceremony at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture on 25 January 2008, Peter Bjerrum was pronounced Doctor Architecturae.

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Comparison of the degrees of Dr. Arch. versus Ph.D. and Dr. Phil. The doctoral degree in architecture is a new academic degree, which Peter Bjerrum is the first person in Denmark to earn. The guidelines for the degree are described in the official text “Bekendtgørelse om doktorgrader ved visse uddannelsesinstitutioner under Kulturministeriet” (Government Order on Doctoral Degrees at Certain Educational Institutions Under the Danish Ministry of Culture) which came into effect in May 2005. According to Section 3, paragraph 2 of this government order, the awarding of the doctoral degree should “reflect an acknowledgement that the author has considerable scientific insight and maturity, and that with his/her dissertation, he/she has brought the science a major step further.” Accordingly, in their evaluation of Peter Bjerrum’s dissertation, the evaluation committee emphasised that a Dr. Arch. cannot be “compared or weighed against a Ph.D. or a Dr. Phil. but should be awarded a unique position in the academic field beyond and alongside the already established strictly scientific possibilities of merit. [...] This implies that the criteria must be closely bound by the profession’s own standards.”

 

Mind Design #6, 2008