Les Trois Logiques Analogiques du Projet en Architecture: De l’impulsion monumentale à la nécessité de la recherche en passant par l’incontournable enseignabilité

Abstract

This paper outlines an epistemological approach to “architectural project” with respect to the notions of potential architecture and edification. Along with “professional projects” and “research projects” we find projects conceived in educational situations by architecture students. Yet, the understanding of such projects suffers some very recurrent disjunctions in most European and North American schools. Indeed, depending on studios and professors, students are often brought to consider their projects as results (as objects), or as representations of a result (as images), and rarely as process of thought (as intellectual journeys). Architecture students often have many difficulties understanding why their projects are, for some, just weak simulations of professional activities, while for other academic disciplines, hardly more than forms of creative activities without real epistemological status: in other words, without real value in the production of knowledge. It is as if student’s thesis neither had a real professional, nor a real disciplinary value: a bad study sketch as it were! Therefore, given the contradictory messages they are fed (from professional, as well as from academic circles) regarding both the pragmatic and epistemological value of their own projects, most students find it difficult to believe that an architectural project can be a vehicle for social changes and cultural mutations. In this paper, building on Jean-Pierre Boutinet’s Anthropologie du projet and D.A. Schön’s most durable hypotheses about reflective practices particularly those stating that architectural knowledge lies at the core of reflective transfers between action and cognition, we investigate a model consisting in three fundamental aims of edification : construction, instruction and translation. This paper also offers some hints at a global analogical approach to edification as a way of both differentiating and putting into relation: professional, pedagogical and research projects in architecture.