Dr  Leandro Minuchin - Teaching

The aim of this project is to organize a research methods course for post-graduate architecture students, that integrates innovative methodological strategies and novel digital interfaces for researching the role of materials in the production of urban landscapes. With the intention of combining visual methodologies and ethnographic and participatory techniques, the course will inform students on how to present and include building materials and the development of different construction practices as central areas of academic inquiry and research. The project will examine and review existing courses on urban and architectural methods, delivered locally and abroad, and produce a syllabus that will combine contributions and empirical examples from urban geography, urban anthropology and architectural history, with a series of methodological tools and procedures arranged in a software application that will help students develop their own research design.

Materiality has emerged as a pivotal area of inquiry in anthropology and sociology. Scholars have developed methods to capture the role of materials and objects in the formation of local identities, practices and landscapes. Despite being a fundamental theoretical category in architectural research, the discipline has not contributed, methodologically, to debates surrounding the agency of materials and the role played by construction practices in the shaping of contemporary urban realms and local networks of association. Relying on the possibilities offered by visual methodologies, this project seeks to expand the scope of architectural research, using the analysis of built and imagined spatial inscriptions as a way of capturing the intricate and fluid networks of sociabilities that become entangled through urban materialities.   

Funded by Methods@manchester

2012/13

Materials, methods and the city. Convenor. 

- A course focusing of the relation between new materialisms and the development of innovative methodological strategies. 

Contested Peripheries Studio. Co-coordinator.

 -MArch studio that explores socio-material entanglements and processes of adaptation and innovation in urban peripheral conditions.  

World Urbanism. Contributor