The Building Is the Argument
Prepared by the ArchUp Research Team.
In the cover illustration, a long building and a smaller pavilion stand on red earth. Their shadows make a diagram almost without trying: mass, interval, orientation and approach become relations that can be read. Yet the image cannot tell us whether the spaces work, how the design developed or what anyone learned from making them. It is a conceptual illustration, not documentation of an identified research project. That limitation is the starting point of this essay. A building can carry an argument, but an attractive building image does not prove one.
Architecture produces knowledge in several ways. It measures performance, interprets history, studies use and tests possibilities through designing. Some contributions can be expressed in a paper; others also depend on a drawing, a model, a construction or an encounter with space. Scientific research, too, depends on instruments, practical skills and material evidence that a publication cannot contain entirely. The question is therefore not whether science owns words and architecture owns experience. It is whether an evaluation system can recognise the forms of evidence appropriate to the inquiry before it.
The building is the argument when spatial decisions are part of an articulated contribution that others can examine. That is a conditional proposition, not a declaration that every building is research. Practice must establish what it investigates, how the work advances understanding and why the contribution matters beyond the fact that an object was produced. The literature on practice research is valuable precisely because it makes that boundary discussable. [1, 2]
This essay develops an architectural interpretation of selected studies on creative practice and research evaluation. Bibliographic details, abstracts and selected accessible passages were checked against publisher and institutional records. It is not a systematic review, an audit of current national rules or a claim to have read every original paper in full. The practical evaluation framework proposed below is our synthesis. Historical findings from a particular country are identified as such, rather than presented as universal conditions.
Practice Is Not the Object of the Research, It Is the Method
The first specificity that evaluation keeps missing is the most fundamental. In the arts, practice itself is a mode of inquiry, not merely the thing the inquiry is about. Artistic research can mean research into artistic practice, but it can also mean artistic practice conducted as research, where the question arises from the process of making and the answer is directed back into the practice, and the created artefact is itself the central contribution to knowledge. Design practice research produces not only objects but new concepts and new knowledge, shaped by the particular situation in which the work is sited. A framework should therefore allow for the research question to develop during an inquiry. This is not unique to the arts, and scientific investigation should not be reduced to a procedure with predetermined findings. In the arts the problem is frequently identified and clarified through the making, and the research dimension may only be fully articulated afterward, in retrospect. The fine art tradition is marked by exactly this tension, the long resistance of artists to having their work reduced to an illustration of a text that supposedly contains its real meaning.
The implication for any honest evaluation is that it must allow the research question and the contribution to be articulated after the fact, and must judge the quality of the process of inquiry, not only the polish of the final object. An architect who arrives at a genuinely new spatial idea through iteration, through building and testing and rebuilding, through the kind of design thinking that cannot state its destination at the outset, may be conducting one important form of architectural research, provided that the inquiry and its contribution can be demonstrated. A system that accepts only a fixed hypothesis and linear report may misrecognise this kind of exploratory work. Allowing a question to develop does not remove the obligation to document how and why it changed.
Knowledge That Must Be Experienced, Not Read
The second specificity follows directly. Artistic research often generates knowledge that is tacit, embodied, experiential, and non propositional, knowledge that enhances understanding rather than producing a generalisable statement, and that is carried in a work which must be experienced rather than only described. In practice based research the artefact cannot simply be replaced by a written account of it, because a full understanding of the work may require access to the work itself, or to the closest possible documentation of a performance or an installation or a building. This is not a mystical claim that artistic knowledge is ineffable and beyond scrutiny. It is a precise claim about where the evidence lives. The evidence base has to include the work and the process, not only a text about the work, and a design artefact that embodies a new concept can have its contribution obscured if it is treated merely as an illustration of an accompanying essay.
For architecture this is a substantial part of the problem. The knowledge in a building is in the building, in how it handles light and movement and threshold and material, in spatial decisions that can be pointed to and argued about but never fully transcribed into prose. A framework that makes text the sole gateway to recognition forces the architect to write a scientific account of a thing whose meaning is not textual, and then evaluates the account rather than the work. The construction itself, the drawings, the built or unbuilt proposal, the documented process of arriving at it, these are the primary evidence, and a serious evaluation accepts them as such, with textual contextualisation where it genuinely helps, rather than demanding that the words carry what only the work can carry.
A Different Meaning of Rigour
Rigour becomes contentious when it is reduced to compliance with a fixed procedure. Interviews examined by Lewandowska, Ochsner and Kulczycki reveal disagreement over how this and other evaluation criteria should be understood. Their study analysed criteria from ten national systems, but the interview sample was in Poland. Its findings should not be mistaken for the views of every artistic research community. [3] But the answer is not that the arts have no rigour. It is that rigour means something different and no less demanding. In practice research, rigour is consistency, appropriateness, and critical responsiveness to a problem as it unfolds, the reflexive coherence between the question and the process, the critical engagement with context, the ethical judgement, the ability to justify decisions and revisions that may only be identifiable in retrospect. This is a high bar. It is simply not the bar a procedural checklist measures.
An evaluation that equates rigour exclusively with a predetermined procedure risks rewarding the work that fits its reporting format. Lewandowska and Kulczycki's study of Polish artistic disciplines identified changes in publication patterns, including increased journal article production alongside a decline in monographs, and discussed the possible influence of evaluation. That historical association does not establish a universal causal law, but it gives substance to the concern that evaluation may shape production as well as record it. [4]
The practical implication is to distinguish consistency from inflexibility. A design investigation can change direction while remaining rigorous if the change is explained, relevant evidence is retained and the revised claim is tested. A beautiful final object with an invented retrospective rationale deserves scrutiny, just as a mechanically complete report with an unconvincing contribution does.
Outputs That Will Not Be Counted
The practical machinery of evaluation breaks down next, at the level of the output itself. Artistic outputs are diverse, often ephemeral, frequently collaborative, and largely not citable in the way a scientific paper is. Exhibitions, installations, performances, compositions, designs, portfolios, curation, site specific and participatory projects, these do not sit in a hierarchy of venues comparable to the ranked journals of the sciences, and citation based indicators are therefore weak or simply invalid across much of the field. The international comparison by Lewandowska, Kulczycki and Ochsner documents variation in the outputs recognised and the disciplinary panels used across the systems examined. It shows why a single publication format should not stand in for the whole field. The study appeared online in 2022 and in its journal issue in 2023. [5] Citation indicators cannot describe the full contribution of works that circulate through exhibitions, performances, buildings or other forms of practice. Thelwall and Delgado argue for contextual data as evidence rather than standardised metrics alone. Rejecting a universal score does not require rejecting evidence. [6]
The deeper trap is the scoring of outputs by type and scale, where a larger exhibition or a longer production or a more labour intensive work is awarded more points than a smaller one. This looks like fairness and transparency, and it confuses labour intensity and scale with quality, rewarding what is expensive or time consuming rather than what is artistically or intellectually stronger. Scale and output type were among the contentious criteria in the Polish interview study. [3] For architecture, the distinction is useful: a small intervention may make a significant contribution, while size alone cannot establish the quality of an inquiry. Architecture knows this better than any field, that square metres do not, by themselves, establish the significance of a work, and a framework that implicitly rewards the big projects over the small and radical ones risks confusing investment and scale with intellectual contribution. The honest alternative is portfolio based assessment with a broad and flexible taxonomy of outputs, judged on the relationship between process and product rather than ranked by format or duration.
Value, Collaboration, and the Question of Who Judges
Two further specificities complete the picture, and both bear directly on architecture. The first is that artistic research carries multiple and contested kinds of value at once, artistic, epistemic, cultural, social, and economic, some of it recognised only by a limited community of practitioners and connoisseurs, and much of it long term and diffuse. Artistic quality and research quality overlap but are not identical, and impact in the arts is often embodied within the process itself rather than generated afterward through dissemination, a performance or an exhibition or a participatory project producing its effect in the encounter rather than in a later citation. A framework that uses only a single metric or a narrow economic impact model risks missing these distinctions. Hellström examines tensions between kinds of value in artistic research through a Swedish case study, rather than offering one universal measure of success. [7] The cities shaped by architectural research register its value over decades and across populations, in ways that an indicator measured only at completion may miss, and the dominant linear model of impact, research produces findings which are then disseminated and used, simply does not describe how architectural or artistic work actually acts on the world.
The second is that much artistic research is collaborative and its relevant peer community is wider than academic specialists. Theatre, dance, film, music, design, and architecture involve performers, technicians, curators, producers, participants, and the public, and individual attribution is often genuinely difficult, so that attribution rules need to distinguish individual contributions without misrepresenting collective production. The community qualified to judge the work is correspondingly broad, including practising artists, critics, curators, producers, and the stakeholders who use and inhabit the work, not only academic peers, and the literature argues explicitly for an extended set of evaluators because quality in these fields cannot be negotiated among academic specialists alone. For architecture this is obvious the moment it is stated. A building is judged by the people who use it, the city that absorbs it, the profession that learns from it, and a panel of academics scoring a research statement is one voice among many that should be in the room, with expertise that must be matched to the particular question. The most serious architectural research into how buildings actually perform in use depends on exactly this extended community of validation, and a framework should explain whose experience is included, whose is missing and how disagreements are assessed.
A Doorway as a Research Question
Consider a hypothetical design investigation into the entrance of a small community building. The starting question concerns how a threshold can make arrival legible while allowing a person to wait without feeling exposed. The researcher develops several arrangements of the door, a recess, a seat and a view into the occupied interior. These are not merely different facade compositions. Each arrangement makes a proposition about how someone will approach, pause and decide whether to enter.
The design becomes more than routine practice when the investigation explains what is being tested, records the alternatives and exposes its reasoning to criticism. A model may reveal a sightline problem. A supervised trial may reveal that the apparent waiting place interrupts another route. A participant may read an invitation where the designer assumed a boundary. These are possible observations in a constructed example, not results from a completed study. Their purpose is to show what an evidence trail could contain.
The eventual building would not need to carry the entire inquiry as a verbal statement. Its threshold could embody a particular response. But a research submission would still need enough context for another person to understand the question, follow the changes and examine what supports the claim. Drawings, observation records and the reasons for discarded options can make the work more open to criticism, rather than subordinate it to a text.
This also prevents a common confusion between evaluation and appreciation. A visitor may like the entrance while the research question remains unanswered. A prototype may fail as a polished architectural object yet disclose a valuable limitation. Both judgements can be legitimate if they name what they assess. Research quality is not guaranteed by aesthetic approval, and a useful negative finding is not cancelled merely because the first design did not succeed.
What Should Travel Beyond the Project
A contribution need not become a universal formula to be useful elsewhere. It might identify a condition under which an entrance strategy becomes difficult, demonstrate a way of comparing alternatives or provide a vocabulary for an overlooked experience. The transferable element is the clarified relationship, including its limits. Copying the final form without those conditions may reproduce the image while losing the knowledge.
For a practice, this suggests keeping a concise record of the decisions that materially changed the work. Why did the team abandon an option? Which observation altered a detail? What remained unresolved at handover? Ordinary project delivery already produces documents, but a research record selects and connects the evidence relevant to an explicit inquiry. It should also distinguish what belongs to the architect, the engineer, the contractor and the people using the building.
The same discipline applies after occupation. If a claim concerns use, the opening day photograph cannot be its only evidence. Observation requires consent, appropriate treatment of personal information and a method proportionate to the question. Feedback should be recorded with its context rather than converted into a promotional quotation. These are proposed principles for responsible architectural inquiry, not a claim that every project must become an academic experiment.
What a Framework Would Have to Do
The conclusion the evidence supports is not that artistic and architectural research should be exempt from scrutiny, which would be its own kind of condescension, treating the arts as too precious to be judged. It is that the scrutiny must be built on the right foundations, plural and medium sensitive rather than forced into either a scientific mould or a vague artistic exceptionalism. Such a framework would define artistic research broadly and transparently, recognising research into art, research through art, and practice as research, with guidance specific to each discipline rather than one generic criterion applied uniformly. It would use a multi dimensional matrix of quality, artistic significance, contribution to understanding, creative and intellectual context, the quality and reflexivity of the process, peer recognition as one signal among several, public and cultural value, collaboration, and the building of the field itself, which in a young discipline is a legitimate outcome rather than a sign of immaturity. It would assess portfolios rather than isolated outputs, require contextualisation without letting text become the only evidence that counts, convene mixed and trained panels of academics and practitioners and curators and stakeholders, treat impact as contribution rather than narrow causal attribution, accommodate collaboration honestly, use longer time windows, and refuse to reward publication counts and venue prestige and scale as ends in themselves.
The aim is an accurate relationship between the inquiry and its evaluation, and the distinction matters because the stakes are not administrative. How a discipline is evaluated can help shape what it produces. A framework that misrecognises architectural knowledge risks discouraging the practice based, exploratory, artefact centred inquiry that can be one of its distinctive contributions, while rewarding familiar formats regardless of the strength of the contribution. Academic rankings and funding competitions risk rewarding whatever is easiest to count, the article over the building, the scale over the idea, the research statement over the work it describes, and the long term sustainability of architecture as a field of knowledge depends on resisting that pressure and insisting, against a machinery built for other disciplines, that a work may carry knowledge that its description cannot replace. The building becomes an argument when its propositions, evidence and limits can be examined. A serious evaluation must learn to read that argument in the work and through its context. Otherwise, it risks rewarding the account while failing to encounter the contribution.
Sources
- Candy, Linda, and Ernest Edmonds. Practice Based Research in the Creative Arts: Foundations and Futures from the Front Line. Leonardo, 51(1), 2018, pp. 63–69.
- Kaszynska, Patrycja, and Lucy Kimbell. Design Practice Research: Conditions and Outcomes. Design and Culture, published online 22 October 2024.
- Lewandowska, Kamila, Michael Ochsner, and Emanuel Kulczycki. Research quality criteria in the Creative Arts. Studies in Higher Education, published online 11 September 2023.
- Lewandowska, Kamila, and Emanuel Kulczycki. Academic research evaluation in artistic disciplines: the case of Poland. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, published online 2021, journal issue 2022.
- Lewandowska, Kamila, Emanuel Kulczycki, and Michael Ochsner. Evaluation of the arts in performance based research funding systems: An international perspective. Research Evaluation, 32(1), 2023, pp. 19–31. First published online 2022.
- Thelwall, Mike, and Maria M. Delgado. Arts and humanities research evaluation: no metrics please, just data. Journal of Documentation, 71(4), 2015, pp. 817–833.
- Hellström, Tomas. Evaluation of artistic research. Research Evaluation, 19(5), 2010, pp. 306–316.
