Dear Dori,
Thanks for a terrific post. I love reading your posts. You capture
the flow of events while letting your reader join you on the scene,
then you bring the issues into a clear, theoretical frame.
You might find this book useful: The Crit. An Architecture Student's
Handbook. I reviewed it for Design Research News in 2001. [Copy of
review below.] The point of your post is somewhat different, but this
book may be useful because it addresses the nature and character of
the critique. The book is quite good -- my comment on scholarly flaws
addressed issues that came up in considering the book in terms of
research issues.
Your post touches on issues that can generate useful ideas. The
distinctions between art and design and the overlapping areas offer a
rich field for inquiry.
Ken
--
From Design Research News, August 2001:
--
Doidge, Charles, with Rachel Sara, and Rosie Parnell.
Cartoons by Mark Parsons. 2000. The Crit. An Architecture
Student's Handbook. Oxford: Architectural Press.
Nearly every student in the making disciplines -
architecture, and design, fine art, and applied - sees the
crit as a difficult experience. Whether it involves a
project during study or the final presentation for a degree,
the crit is a central aspect of an education in these
fields. Understanding how to make best use of the crit will
help design scholars in every field.
This book is a useable, well-written guide to the crit.
Directed to students, it will also help teachers and
research supervisors. While many fields of design research
make no use of the crit, nearly every design student and
design teacher will take part in a crit or review at some
point. This book offers helpful suggestions and benchmarks.
It is also useful for professional presentations.
Despite its value as a practical guide, this book is less
satisfactory in scholarship. It is seasoned with useful
quotes and citations that are poorly sourced. It is
unacceptable to cite a single fact or a one-sentence quote
from a 257-page by casually referring to author and year.
The scholar's work involves organizing sources and making
them useful. When architecture and design professors make
claims to scholarship, the standards of good scholarship
apply.
Good scholarship also involves critical attention to
historical fact. The authors claim that the crit began with
the eighteenth-century tripos of Cambridge University. Their
dates are off by over a thousand years.
The crit is rooted in two traditions, the guild tradition,
and the academic tradition. When guild apprentices sought
journeyman status, they were required to submit a piece of
work to a board of masters. The jury of masters reviewed the
journeyman piece and conducted an oral examination on
technique, craft knowledge, and professional ethics. After
passing this crit, an apprentice advanced to journeyman and
was allowed to work freelance. A similar examination took
place when a journeyman submitted his masterpiece for
advancement to master standing. These traditions are
probably rooted in ancient history. Some aspects of these
traditions go back to the ancient crafts of the Middle East.
These customs were clearly in place among European guilds by
the Middle Ages.
The academic tradition of public debate to defend a
scholarly thesis began more than two thousand years ago with
the philosophers and rhetoricians of classical Greece. The
medieval universities established the custom of public
lectures, debates or defense of a thesis by the 1200s.
Public presentation was required for the inceptio that
inaugurated a candidate into the body of masters or doctors.
The authors of this well structured book on educational and
professional practice should have restricted themselves to
what they know. They attempted to spice the book with
learning, enhancing its authority with scholarship and
history. When designers, architects, and artists make
scholarly claims, they must respect the requirements of
scholarship. These include proper sourcing and critical
investigation of factual claims.
KF
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