Guerrilla research Alejandro Zaero-Polo Foreign Office Architects 游击队研究外交部建筑师.pdfVIP

Research Symposium 2005: Design as Research 06: Guerrilla research Alejandro Zaero-Polo Foreign Office Architects This is going to be a truly chaotic presentation because as I was trying to put together the talk I realised that I actually had very few articulate things to say about research. It is quite difficult for a smallish office to structure its work in the form of research - ours is not a practice that is involved in mass production or manufacturing like aircraft-making. We do not have the scale to devote a particular part of the office to the activity of research, so for us research becomes almost an intrinsic part of production. We were assigned ‘research on geometry’ by the Symposium but this was immediately superseded by more recent research we have been involved in. This research is pointing in many other directions, not only in terms of the domains in which we are trying to investigate knowledge and possibilities, but also in terms of the processes that we are following to do these investigations. We used to believe that we were generating form; that we were making forms emerge out of geometrical investigations, but later on we realised that for several projects it was absolutely necessary to have an almost a priori image or iconography of what we were going to try to do and the