Methods of Analysis and Imagination

The Chair of Methods of Analysis and Imagination holds that architecture, more than a response to programme or problem solving, is about the development of distinct approaches, instruments and methods for the production, use and understanding of the built environment. The chair wants to challenge preconceptions regarding the role of the architect and inspire the advancement of inventive approaches to architecture, while enabling disciplined yet critical action towards buildings and cities. Taking the role of the architect as one that is dynamic, socially engaged and locally specific, the chair is seeking for informed, cultured and engaged methods of thinking and practicing architecture. 

Next to analytical methods providing conceptual, contextual and disciplinary reflections on architectural questions, the Chair explicitly focuses on the definition and use of projective instruments and methods, including creative imagination as a crucial source of innovation and the creation of novel ideas in a diversity of fields of human action, including the arts and the sciences. 

Beyond formal and programmatic considerations, the Chair addresses the imaginative processes necessary for the development of possible futures for the built environment, together with the instruments and methods required to achieve those possible futures. These instruments and methods include those proper to the architectural discipline, but also contemplate trans-disciplinarity as a valuable source of knowledge for architects. By fostering transdisciplinary encounters between architecture and sociology, literature, cinema, the visual arts, and choreography, for example, the Chair aims to generate and represent knowledge about the perceptual, cognitive and tactile aspects of the built environment; making a plea to incorporate a diversity of knowledge and imagination into architectural discourse, education, and into the design practice of architects.