PraXtice History
PraXtice has its seed back in the days when as a newly minted IBM architect I nearly died of exhaustion trying to apply “the method”. The hundreds of hours of effort, the mindless repetition and the mountains of paper convinced me that there had to be a better way of doing architecture. And so the journey began.
The second revelation; on discovering that most of my colleagues only paid lip service to method, was that bad methodology invariably leads to no methodology. This is something that organizational theory could have told me if I'd only known it existed. The idea that architecture could benefit by appropriating from other disciplines was then so far over the horizon that it might as well not existed.
Being new I thought I'd learn from the best. Problem was who was the best? And what could be learnt? Sadly it turned out; later confirmed by research, that the answer was not very much at all. And so I turned to the literature. There's no shortage of it and that's actually part of the problem. A few things quickly became apparent. First, most of the literature is written by people who were successful, who memorializes their failures? Secondly it implied that there was some all encompassing platonic method the application of which would solve your problems. So, armed with this vision I set off on my PhD.
After about three years of reading everything in sight and some things never likely to see the light of day. I reached some depressing conclusions. Firstly, it was almost impossible to compare any two reports with any degree of certainty; there simply was no common epistemology. Secondly if all the successes contained at least a subset of the platonic method clearly not all aspects applied in all projects all the time. This could in fact be objectively proven that anything in architecture could be proved was amazing.
About this time the idea that all architectures evolve was beginning to gain general acceptance but that just seemed to make the search even more difficult. However, hidden at the intersection of these difficulties was a gem? If all reports are true of their author's situation then similar architectures with different outcomes are the result of the different ways the situation necessitated the application of method. In short how you do architecture was at least as important as what you do; something later confirmed. Suddenly the concept of practice entered centre stage!
However, there still remained the issue of what to actually do? This is something that more than one academic has pointed out is often only reported as an outcome; leaving the architect to make up the how as they go along. Again the situation was made difficult by the lack of epistemology. However, authors do report similar activities and these with lists of critical success factors do share common themes.
This idea of deeper thematic structures, again difficult to define given the acknowledged challenges was not new. But the idea clearly only lived in the academic world. What PDAP (Purpose Driven Architecture Practice) as my research had been christened by then did was begin to structure and classify those themes which were to become the Architectonic Activities: Realization, Cultivation and Assimilation.
With this structure established it became possible to look at the body of knowledge in a new light. And what was clear was that most of the literature fell in the Realization Activity a little in the Cultivation and nearly nothing into Assimilation. Initially this cast doubt on Assimilation's existence. However these deeper thematic relationships had been uncovered by previous researchers and that literature confirmed its existence. The clincher however, was data from interviews with very experienced senior architects. The common views; possibly the result of the seniority of their roles, they expressed about the key to success were not methodological but sociological.
At first it was thought that they were reluctant to talk for political reasons. However, it soon became clear that they actually lacked the vocabulary to express their views. And why would they have such a vocabulary they were all technicians? But what they were talking about wasn't technical it was sociological. So, here I was looking for a methodological fix and I've just demonstrated that method wasn't the answer. It was depressing to contemplate that the people looking to fix architecture were the wrong people and I was one of them!
What was needed was a new approach one that accepted the realities of adverse environments; Spewak and Hill had noted as far back as 1992 “EAP should not be attempted in an unfavorable climate”, and provided a means of moulding it. That's where PraXtice began.
