On March 7, 2010, Sergio López-Piñeiro presented How to Do a Thesis: Practice Models as Instigators for Academic Theses at the 2010 Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) Annual Meeting in New Orleans.
An academic architectural thesis is usually portrayed as a blank space boxed out from and located in between the profession and the academy. Students are allowed and encouraged to occupy this space freely. However, this occupation comes with a condition as, at the end of the thesis semester, students must respond to the question: “Who are you?” The academy expects students to respond to this question through three sets of acts: selecting a problem, issue, project, area of focus; figuring out a method to approach the selected area of work; and, designing a tangible product (through drawings, models, installation, etc.).
But, “Who are you?” is a very difficult question. For some students, this blank space might be a party (as the blank space portrayed by Jørgen Leth in his short 1967 film “The Perfect Human”) and for others it will inevitably become a prison (as portrayed by George Lucas in “THX 1138” in 1971). Due to this unpredictability, many faculty members are constantly proposing arguments for a more controlled and regulated—less blank—thesis exercise.
This blank space, the architectural thesis, should neither be abolished nor filled up: the thesis should not be eliminated—unless the student does not want to do it—and it should not be more structured—unless the student would like it to be more structured. This blank space should be maintained and protected as it is because, in its current condition, it is necessary for the discipline at large (profession plus academy) as it acts as a mirror reflecting the discipline’s most current and pressing concerns.
Instead of asking “Who are you?” it might make more sense to ask “How do you work?” In fact, this should be a self-asked question “How do I work?” Knowing how one works can lead to—and in some situations might be—the answer of whom one is. “How to Do a Thesis: Practice Models as Instigators for Academic Theses” thus attempts to replace this metaphysical question with a more pragmatic one. The method put forward in this article is not really supposed to be a design method on how to produce the ‘content’ of a thesis but rather, it must be understood as a way for students to better know how they work so that their experience in the blank space is a more enjoyable one.
By expanding on the traditional definition of an architectural academic thesis through its reconsideration from a practice-based point of view, this article would like to propose a new methodology that might open up the current discussions around architectural academic theses. This method will be laid out by, first, categorizing practice models through various groupings of the elements that constitute the usual structure of an architectural education. And second, by extracting from these practice models new options for what an academic thesis might be, pointing out specific strengths and weaknesses of some selected cases.
Sergio Lopez-Pineiro, “How to Do a Thesis: Practice Models as Instigators of Academic Theses” in Bruce Goodwin and Judith Kinnard (eds.), Re:Building, Washington DC: ACSA Press, 2010, 798-803.
