Further Reading Required

Further Reading Required was the eighth Architecture & Seminar held termly at the Bartlett School of Architecture providing opportunities for staff and student researchers within the school to initiate research conversations at interdisciplinary crossings. The one day symposium opened a discussion about why we might turn to building specifications, contracts, and technical literature with researchers in architectural history and theory, building construction, law, and literature, and with architectural practitioners interested in the effects of working within this framework and in finding openings for its subversion. Further Reading Required asked how we understand the meaning and value of these documents and what approaches we might take in reading them. What social, material, and discursive histories are made available through these documents? How might we read them not merely for themselves or only for their technical contents, but as historical documents of specific processes, the specification of labour and materials, particular social and material relations, technological developments, or concepts of material and matter? A further key premise for the event was that these legal documents have a constitutive role in the production of architecture, and that they can no more be understood simply as neutral aids to building than as straightjackets and limitations to design. The debate about BIM demonstrated not only the timeliness of our discussions, but also the degree to which the kinds of documents and contractual arrangements employed in making buildings – and the precise form they take – can shape architectural practice and what is, and what can be, built.