Collaboration and Practice

Abstract

The question of how architecture is shaped by collaborative practice has become increasingly relevant with the ongoing strains of financial crises, greater attention to resource allocation and technological developments in project management and global communication. Many firms are headed by joint partners and work in cooperation with artists and other specialists. Others have designed processes that encourage participative design with local communities, blurring the traditional division between client and architect. Architectural pedagogy is also responding to these changes as curricula focus on multidisciplinary team projects with degree programs in collaborative practice. Some critics have also posited that the role of the architect is no longer to develop content but to design, organise and synthesise the increasingly complex and often ephemeral networks involved in the development of a project. These transformations suggest that authorship is itself being reconsidered and that new forms of agency will arise in parallel with new ways of working together. The research lays out a typological framework for understanding collaborative practice in contemporary architecture and interrogates the ways in which forms of collaboration have been driven by a combination of forces including: technological advances, economic necessity, new conceptions of labor, socio-political shifts, and a desire to explore bottom-up approaches to thinking about the built environment. Using interviews with practitioners from Asia, Europe and North America, an analysis of radical architectural movements of the late 1960s, and a critical reading of theories of collaboration and participative aesthetics from art and design, the project examines contemporary understandings of collaboration through both historic and interdisciplinary lenses. Rather than taking for granted that architecture is a collaborative endeavour, we suggest that an awareness of working together can play a role in engendering new social and material forms of architectural practice.