Albena Yaneva (knowingly or not) took up Reyner Banham’s challenge as formulated 20 years ago in his Black Box essay; to venture into what architects actually ‘do’ and to do this through psychological and anthropological research into the messy reality of the office and observing the banal and mundane processes of design. This is what Albena Yaneva did and 010 publishers recently published her ethnographic research (which she did from 2002 till 2004) on the office life and design practice of OMA: Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design [buy]. Unlike the more traditional sociological research in architectural practice such as Dana Cuff’s Architecture: The Story of a Practice [buy], Yaneva has based her understanding of the social on Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT).

“ANT maps relations that are simultaneously material (between things) and “semiotic” (between concepts). It assumes that many relations are both material and “semiotic”. For example, the interactions in a bank involve both people, their ideas, and technologies.

Together these form a single network.
Actor-network theory tries to explain how material–semiotic networks come together to act as a whole (for example, a bank is both a network and an actor that hangs together, and for certain purposes acts as a single entity). As a part of this it may look at explicit strategies for relating different elements together into a network so that they form an apparently coherent whole.
According to actor-network theory, such actor-networks are potentially transient, existing in a constant making and re-making [1]. This means that relations need to be repeatedly “performed” or the network will dissolve. (The bank clerks need to come to work each day, and the computers need to keep on running.) They also assume that networks of relations are not intrinsically coherent, and may indeed contain conflicts (there may be poor labor relations, or computer software may be incompatible).” – Wikipdia (28-3-2010)

She has chosen to report on her research object, the office life and design practice at OMA , in the format of short stories composed of anecdotes, interviews and office stories. So, no academic language and heavy referencing, but staying close to the language, operations and materials on the office floor. Yaneva makes this deliberate choice based on a distinction she makes between meta- and infra-reflexive discourse, a distinction developed by Latour. “Meta-reflexivity is based on the idea that the most deleterious effect of a text is to be naively believed by the reader as in some way relating to a referent out there. Reflexivity is supposed to counteract this effect by rendering the text unfit for normal consumption  (which often means unreadable). This accepts as given that the readers are naïve believers, that there is such a thing as a normal consumption, that people easily believe what they read, and finally that believing is always to relate an account to some referent ‘out there.’ This is a very naïve set of beliefs in the naïve beliefs of readers.”( Bruno Latour in The Politics of Explanation: an Alternative [pdf]) “I prefer to follow an infra-reflexive approach that goes against this common belief by asking no privilege for the account at hand. This exercise in infra-reflexive writing can be seen as a test of the short story genre in design studies. In the accounts presented here, architects and their models are free and active anthropological projects, full of life, and ready to take part in an intriguing story; design process appears as a reflexive and responsive event.” – Yaneva Albena

What follows are accessible stories about office life, the trajectory of design objects through the office space, with simple illustrative examples, experiences of individual designers. The drawback of Yaneva’s approach is that the there is a lot of repetition in the text, the importance of the foam-model environment is stressed over and over again. Nonetheless, the book contains many revealing anecdotes and insightful interviews, also the restraint from academic referencing is a nice experience and makes it a quick and accessible read.

For me personally Yaneva’s work is special, because she really did the research I at one point in my graduation project at TU Delft had in mind. That is, to do a more or less ethnographic research in an architecture office based on a grounded theory method (which has some affinity with ANT). I eventually did a comparative literature research and wrote a theory [pdf]. One of my main inspirations was Donald Schön, as was Yaneva’s, since Schön was most interested in the perspective and experience of the designer him/herself, and thus also in working on a theory which would fit that experience. A theory that would be recognizable to architects, and not exclusively for one specific type of practice, or from only one point of view. So I’m very happy with Yaneva’s work! She writes:

“The common feature of all stories is that they all account for the nature of design invention; the latter is not reduced here to an abstract concept of creation or construction. Instead, I tackle it as something that revolves into concrete actions and practices: in collective rituals, techniques, habits and skills ingrained by training and daily repetition, in reuse of materials and recycling of historical knowledge and foam chunks. It is also a very fragile process – when a building is in the making and as long as it exists as a scale model, its existence is very tentative, very frail. At any moment in design process it can live or it can die, it can merge into something else, it can be reused, recollected. That is, a view of design as constituted from the inside; it stems from the experience of making.” – Yaneva Albena

What I found in Yaneva’s stories are illustrations and elaborations on many of my own theoretical ideas. In a series of posts that will follow I will elaborate on this. To be expected are posts on C.S.Peirce‘s Diagrammatic Reasoning, illustrated by some of Yaneva’s anecdotes and observations, as well as an elaboration on the rhetoric behind the Seattle Central Library into which Yaneva provides some different angles on how this supposedly ‘super-logical’ building came to be.

Banham would be pleased to read Yaneva’s ethnographic account of the ‘tribe’ of architects housed in their ‘tribal longhouse’ on the Heer Bokkelweg, especially when he would read about Olga’s dance.

“Watch Olga as she is seized by something unexpected: she starts straying in the office with the new NATO model in her hands. Is there a design idea that precedes the shape we see as we follow Olga in her excited dance through the office, showing the model that holds the idea to tell the architects from other project bubbles? No, no one can claim there is an abstract idea that first appears in the creator’s mind, and is later embedded, incorporated, materialized in a shape. The idea emerges as inseparable from sensible matter; it has an objective locus.” – Yaneva Albena

Something of the likes of a ritual almost happens in the office, Olga is exited by a ‘discovery’ and wants to share her excitement. Also it happens to her, it’s not a preconceived concept in the mind that just needs to be drawn or made. If there is anything of a mystical nature happening in architectural design it happens to the designer, and is not done by the designer. The locus of ideas is to a large extent outside the architects brain, and heavily influenced by the possibilities and limits of the tools and materials architects use in their studio. Models are never thrown away, architectural inventions (remember the patents in Content?) are cherished and constitute the laboratory architects works in. All these ideas, patterns, devices, parti or concepts materialized either as models, drawings or pixels, in other words this is the external hard-drive of the architectural brain, this is the stuff architect think with.

A review of Yaneva’s book at Archined (March 15 2010) : Blue Foam

Albena Yaneva, Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design, o10 publishers 2009, p. 128, € 19,50, ISBN 987 90 6450 714 4