Expanding Architectural Research Tracing Socio-Material Practices

Abstract

Architecture is increasingly produced and transformed within complex socio-material networks that connect people, materials, institutions, and environments across multiple scales. To understand spatial transformation, research methods are needed that can trace how these relations unfold in practice. This lecture explores how Actor–Network Theory (ANT) can expand the methodological repertoire of architectural and artistic research. Rather than treating architecture primarily as a finished object or the result of designerly authorship, ANT invites us to examine how spaces emerge through ongoing negotiations between human and nonhuman actors. From this perspective, design appears less as a singular creative act and more as a process shaped by infrastructures, technologies, narratives, and everyday practices.

Drawing on my work in architectural ethnography, the lecture discusses methods such as observation, walking interviews, drawing interviews, and narrative approaches. These approaches allow researchers to follow architectural processes as they unfold and to make visible the often hidden socio-material dynamics through which spaces are produced, inhabited, and transformed.