1st Edition
The Architect and the Academy Essays on Research and Environment
This book presents an expansive overview of the development of architectural and environmental research, with authoritative essays spanning Dean Hawkes’ impressive 50-year academic career.
The book considers the relationship between the technologies of the environment and wider historical and theoretical factors, with chapters on topics ranging from the origins of modern ‘building science’ in Renaissance England to technology and imagination in architecture. It includes numerous architectural examples from renowned architects such as Christopher Wren, Peter Zumthor, Alvar Aalto, Robert Venturi and Carlo Scarpa.
Aimed at students, scholars, and researchers in architecture and beyond, this illustrated volume collates important and wide-ranging essays tracing the definition, scope and methodologies of architectural and environmental studies, with a foreword by Susannah Hagan.
Foreword by Susannah Hagan
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Essay 1. The centre and the periphery: Some reflections on the nature and conduct of architectural research
Essay 2. The architect and the academy
Essay 3. The shaping of architectural research
Essay 4. Bridging the cultures: Architecture, models and computers in 1960s Cambridge
Essay 5. The environment of the Elizabethan house: Hardwick Hall
Essay 6. The origins of building science in the architecture of Renaissance England
Essay 7: The measureable and the unmeasureable of daylight design
Essay 8. The selective environment: Environmental design and cultural identity
Essay 9. The technical imagination: Thoughts on the relation of technique and design in architecture
Essay 10. Typology versus invention: Acoustics and the architecture of music performance
Essay 11. Musical affinities: Aalto and Kokkonen, Scarpa and Nono
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Dean Hawkes has been a teacher, researcher and practitioner of architecture for over half a century. For 30 years he taught and researched in the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge and, between 1995 and 2002, was professor of architectural design at the Welsh School of Architecture at Cardiff University. Following his retirement, he returned to Cambridge as a fellow of Darwin College, where he continues to research and teach. He retired from architectural practice in 2010. His research focusses on the relationship between technics and poetics in architecture and is principally concerned with questions of environmental design. The essays collected in this book range across this broad field, covering two distinct themes: The Culture and Origins of Architectural Research and Themes in the Architecture of Environment. Together these complement the author’s series of Routledge books: The Environmental Tradition (1996), The Selective Environment (2001), The Environmental Imagination (1st ed. 2008, 2nd ed. 2019) and Architecture and Climate (2012).
"The Architect and the Academy encapsulates specificity and speciality within the eminent career of Dean Hawkes, a true symbiosis between academia and practice – whether tectonic-musical ‘play’ between Alvar Aalto and Joonas Kokkonen, or career-comparisons of Leslie Martin and Serge Chermayeff. Hence Hawkes’ essays bring compulsive fascination and intrigue to the ‘environmental dimension of architecture’."
Colin Porteous, Emeritus Professor, The Glasgow School of Art, UK
"Dean Hawkes’ career connecting architectural research, practice, writing and teaching has spanned fifty years. His new book collects reflections on architectural research culture, and environmental and technical imagination. Hawkes’s essays demonstrate that environmental theories and histories – increasingly popular and urgent because of our climate crisis – are not new but extend from long-standing disciplinary values and habits."
Adam Sharr, Professor of Architecture, and Head of the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, at Newcastle University, UK
"Drawing from essays written across his long career, Hawkes establishes design as the proper mode of inquiry in architecture, distinguishing it from the kinds of research conducted in the sciences and humanities from which it necessarily borrows. He explores similar approaches by Renaissance and contemporary architects, for whom experiments with light, sound, and heat are methods of discovery and invention."
William W. Braham, FAIA, Professor & Director, Department of Architecture, Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, USA
"These Dean Hawkes' reflections become a fundamental book for understanding a fundamental moment in the evolution of architecture."
Sergio Los, Professor of Architectural Composition, IUAV University of Venice, Italy
"Dean Hawkes’ books never fail to delight and to inspire, and this one is no exception. It is both thoughtful and thought-provoking, beautifully evocative and simultaneously rigorous in its historical and factual approach. This is a book to be read slowly and savoured as the themes of each essay unfolds. It deftly establishes the positioning of architecture within the academy and the manner in which different disciplines and the strands of education, research, and practice were woven together – with different degrees of tension – to shape that positioning."
Fiona Smyth, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
