Closing the implementation gap:

a critical model for architectural research

Abstract

As design innovations become the center figure in architecture, teaching research methods and skills is gaining momentum in architectural education and in most architecture schools nowadays. This paper calls for the development of a model which encourages researchers, who utilize a range of methodologies, to acknowledge the values and assumptions implicit in human behavior with buildings. This demands attention to epistemological issues involving knowledge, its nature and forms, how it is acquired and how it is communicated, and pay attention to ontological issues concerned with the relationship between man and its environment. This paper introduces different methodological frameworks for architectural research in the past decades. Although there are a variety of orientations discussed, philosophical, conceptual, and technical, most studies reflect an understanding of people and objects as discrete entities interacting in a unilateral and passive way. This understanding is found to be the essential cause of the 'implementation gap' between architectural research and practice. For the gap to close, the development of a new research framework is needed which encourages researchers to acknowledge the ontological and epistemological issues associated with architectural practice, research, and education.