Mike Martin, PhD, FAIA
University of California at Berkeley
2005 Latrobe Award Recipient

I am Mike Martin. I’m actually a faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley and one of three recipients of the 2005 Latrobe Award. I will talk a little bit about the Latrobe research piece in just a moment. But before I do that, I wanted to say that I established something at Berkeley called the Design Practice Group. It's actually a group of graduate students and two other faculty members who are really focused on the issues of trying to make a kind of a connection between the Academy and practice in a research kind of format. And we're really interested in this from the standpoint of design as the kind of spine around which this is actually developed and as soon as you do that, you know—I already had two people here in this room ask me a question about the concept of whether design is really something that has research connected to it.

And obviously my answer is yes, but I think this is one of the major questions that we have to somehow grapple with. And it seems to me there are kind of two paradigms that we operate within, in most schools of architecture today and with most faculty when we think about design.  I will frame this pretty simply; with the seven minutes I have I can't really talk about it in any great depth.

Design is research. Okay, the other major paradigm is design as research. And they're quite different. I think it comes back to something that Matt talked about, and it has to do with the issue of how you frame the questions. And then this is also, I think, related to another kind of set of the way in which we look at knowledge production in relationship to the kind of larger context that we’re a part of. Basically, I think in the academic community and in the professional community as well when we think of knowledge production we think of it basically from kind of an experiential base and from our kind of predecessors of the kind of apprentice master model where you learn about your profession through experience.

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