navigating in heterogeneityof finding hidden connections between seemingly disparate elements to construct new
coherencies. it investigates situations through spatial understanding in a wide sense,
design actions, tentative proposals and explorative experiments. Thinking through
sketching as a tentative activity has had an almost emblematic status among archi-
tects, described by donald schön (1991: 134) as a creative knowledge process heading
towards new solutions to problems. one may, however, question why knowledge today
is still so strongly glued to producing answers and solutions. answers are only one part
of generating knowledge. They are seductive in the sense that they deliver seemingly
final conclusions, and may thereby contain lots of normative traps – prescriptions on
how things should be, sometimes on quite loose grounds. if knowledge is understood as
a networking, continuous and collective field of action, it must be equally important
to produce alternative perspectives, ideas, strategies and new questions, including the
innovation of models and products, not as final statements but as part of a shared ac-
tion space extended over time. Because art- based research does not provide ‘proof’ in
a traditional sense, one should beware of, and recognize, its prominence to serve the
‘archive’ of collective knowledge (as discussed by michel Foucault, 1972) with fuel of
diverse kinds where questions, alternative perspectives and new possibilities have the
same dignity as underpinned verifications, especially in the process of providing gate-
ways for communication and dialogue across paradigm borders. in the other direction,
practice- based methods can incorporate, e.g. accuracy from technical measurements,
critical perspectives from social sciences, and theoretical argumentation from the hu-
manities.
The Japanese literary scholar Kojin Karatani argues that the ‘will for architecture’
- that is, to create constructions – is the starting point for all of Western thought. on
the basis of Wittgenstein, Karatani sees architecture as an open, communicative event
conditioned by the circumstances of the situation. he breaks down structuralistic
attempts to bypass or exclude the subject, but at the same time he criticizes
phenomenology’s individual subjects with universal significance – subjects that ‘hear
themselves speak’ – and emphasizes instead ‘the multiplicity of subjects’ and ‘the
relative other’. he says that because architecture is an event, it is always contingent; it
is ‘a communication with the other, who, by definition, does not follow the same set of
rules’ (Karatani 1995: 133–47).
architectural thinking always involves the relationship body- space and often uses
an active decoding of its surroundings that integrate all our senses and anchor them
in bodily experience. in heterogeneity, the body is drawn into practice as an actively
constructing, discursive agent. it emphasizes ‘the multiplicity of subjects’ and ‘the
relative other’ (de Certeau 1986: 201ff; Karatani 1995: 93, 120, 33–38), challenging
ostensibly neutral relationships between body, perception, representation and space,
instead raising questions such as: whose body, whose space, which sight, how, when,
why?
Thus, architectural thinking can be understood as a kind of embodied realism,
discussed by george lakoff and mark Johnson (lakoff and Johnson 1999: 17–22, 37ff.,
77f., 102; see also Johnson 2007). as linguists and a philosopher involved in cognitive
science, they hold that our understanding of the world is situation- based and corporeally
anchored through our sensomotory system which acknowledges constructing as the
most essential force in the understanding of our surroundings. Cognitive science