Hamish Lonergan
former doctoral student
Design Studio Encounters: Narrating Tacit Knowledge in Architectural Education, 1969-2021
Something like tacit knowledge has long played an important role in architectural studio education: the sensibilities, intuitions and skills in design that students develop, but which are difficult to precisely articulate. Architecture schools, and often the individual design studios within them, form ‘communities of tacit knowledge,’ bound by shared disciplinary attitudes, theoretical positions, and conventions. Yet, tacit knowledge also has a specific philosophical meaning. The term was coined by the philosopher-turned-scientist Michael Polanyi in the 1950s, emphasising the individual nature of scientific discovery in relation to collective traditions. Architectural educators have rarely invoked this specific Polanyian sense of tacit knowledge; and, where they do, often only in footnotes, letters and unpublished essays, or alluded to in rumours or coincidence. In this dissertation, I investigate these glancing references to Polanyi as instances when tacit knowledge—though always present—was brought into focus and addressed in the studio. In this sense, seemingly-trivial citations become the catalyst to probe how educators and students share tacit knowledge, testing theories against practice and the lingering influence of Polanyi’s epistemology against something closer to architectural reality. These instances range from the North American studios of Melvin Charney and Colin Rowe in the 1970s to the International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD), 1976-86; from postcritical architecture of the 2000s to studios at ETH Zurich since 2020. Tacit knowledge poses particular methodological difficulties. By definition, anything captured in archival documents or traditional academic writing is unlikely to be tacit at all. For this reason, I develop a set of experimental approaches to narrate moments when members of various communities of tacit knowledge encountered each other. Here, tacit knowledge becomes legible through the disagreement, negotiation and cooperation of communities from different contexts: knowledge assumed as natural in one place is revealed as specific, not universal. Drawing on the work of philosopher Marjorie Grene, queer and feminist theories, and methods of autoethnography and re-enactment, this approach ultimately acknowledges the inevitable encounter between research subject and my own situated tacit knowledge as researcher.
This research forms part of a larger EU Horizons 2020 project, ‘TACK Communities of Tacit Knowledge: Architecture and its Ways of Knowing’, grant no. 860413.
Something like tacit knowledge has long played an important role in architectural studio education: the sensibilities, intuitions and skills in design that students develop, but which are difficult to precisely articulate. Architecture schools, and often the individual design studios within them, form ‘communities of tacit knowledge,’ bound by shared disciplinary attitudes, theoretical positions, and conventions. Yet, tacit knowledge also has a specific philosophical meaning. The term was coined by the philosopher-turned-scientist Michael Polanyi in the 1950s, emphasising the individual nature of scientific discovery in relation to collective traditions. Architectural educators have rarely invoked this specific Polanyian sense of tacit knowledge; and, where they do, often only in footnotes, letters and unpublished essays, or alluded to in rumours or coincidence. In this dissertation, I investigate these glancing references to Polanyi as instances when tacit knowledge—though always present—was brought into focus and addressed in the studio. In this sense, seemingly-trivial citations become the catalyst to probe how educators and students share tacit knowledge, testing theories against practice and the lingering influence of Polanyi’s epistemology against something closer to architectural reality. These instances range from the North American studios of Melvin Charney and Colin Rowe in the 1970s to the International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD), 1976-86; from postcritical architecture of the 2000s to studios at ETH Zurich since 2020. Tacit knowledge poses particular methodological difficulties. By definition, anything captured in archival documents or traditional academic writing is unlikely to be tacit at all. For this reason, I develop a set of experimental approaches to narrate moments when members of various communities of tacit knowledge encountered each other. Here, tacit knowledge becomes legible through the disagreement, negotiation and cooperation of communities from different contexts: knowledge assumed as natural in one place is revealed as specific, not universal. Drawing on the work of philosopher Marjorie Grene, queer and feminist theories, and methods of autoethnography and re-enactment, this approach ultimately acknowledges the inevitable encounter between research subject and my own situated tacit knowledge as researcher.
This research forms part of a larger EU Horizons 2020 project, ‘TACK Communities of Tacit Knowledge: Architecture and its Ways of Knowing’, grant no. 860413.
