Architectural Case Study Models
(COPYRIGHT © 2022 MIKAEL POWELL. All Rights Reserved)
Like Stake’s(1997) assessment, there are several claims to a model for architectural case studies. One is an academic version developed from architecture and design practitioners in a university setting. Another is developed in a commercial environment for practitioners directly involved in the architecture and construction industry.
Purpose of architectural case study for the academic community
Dr. Dilanthi Amaratunga, director of the Research Institute for the Built and Human Environment at the University of Salford (Amaratunga & Baldry 2001) concurs with Stake’s (1997) understanding of the requirements of case study that examine the process of a singular instance. Amaratunga & Baldry (2001) go on to write that in architetecture “case studies are tailor made for exploring new processes or behaviours or ones which are little understood. In this sense, case studies have an important function in generating hypotheses and building theory in built environment research” (p. 13).
Amaratunga & Baldry describe philosophies of conducting architectural research. “In research design, therefore, the issue then becomes not whether one has uniformly adhered to prescribed canons of either logical positivism or phenomenology but whether one has made sensible methods decisions given the purpose of the study, the questions being investigated, and the resources available”(p.3). A case study is interpretive– It does not need to control behavioral events in the case. It reports and interprets. It can be positivistic or phenomenological and she argues that mixed methods can make environmental behavioral research better when it is suitable for the research question. Ultimately, the purpose of case study research is to add to existing knowledge in a way that advances understanding by providing a solution or asking better questions. Amaratunga & Baldry say that a case study should not be used to reinforce a known fact, rather, this type of research “is able to draw on inductive methods of research, which aim to build theory and generate hypotheses rather than primarily to test them” (p. 14).
Purpose of architectural case study for practitioners
Architectural Record (2006), a national award-winning magazine, is a commercial publication that has a circulation of over 70,000 and is a publication of the American Institute of Architects, a non-profit organization of the architectural community that has over 300 state and local chapters throughout the United States. The magazine has been published for over a century and the “core mission of Architectural Record is to educate and inspire its audience” (Architectural Record 2009a). Regularly published case studies present “a comprehensive look into construction goals, plans and implementation. The very best of analyses, case studies and write ups by expert architects– the magazine has to be a special read” (Architectural Record 2009b).
The intended recipients are design students, and those individuals involved in the architecture industry around the world. With these two models in mind, the following is a collection of architectural case studies.
Architectural Record magazine published a collection of exemplary schools designed and constructed in the 21st century. These schools are meant to be an examples of both environmentally sustainable architecture and buildings designed to meet the needs of students in a community context. Both schools have achieved the certification of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), the non-profit organization that rates the environmental performance of buildings. Educators in these schools say that the environmentally conscious building systems in the facilities heighten awareness of the environment for students and instill a since of stewardship. Moreover, the design of the spaces incorporates daylighting for better illumination. Of the collection of case studies, I will focus on two schools - the Rosa Parks School, in Portland, Oregon, and Fossil Ridge High School in Fort Collins, Colorado, both authored by B.J. Novitski (2008).
The Rosa Parks School is a kindergarten through sixth grade facility for 550 students in a renovated subsidized housing complex. This case study exemplifies collaboration between the public housing authority, school district and private non-profit youth organizations to create one shared facility. (See youth organization section in attachment 2). In addition, it is designed with the maximum use of daylighting to illuminate spaces.
The Fossil Ridge High School is in the Poudre School District in Fort Collins, Colorado. This school is exemplary because it has a large square footage and yet it accommodates a divided curriculum that is separated into three distinct learning communities.
Purpose of the collection of architectural case studies
Joann Gonchar AIA (2008), a senior editor who focuses on building science and technology issues at Architectural Record, writes the introduction to collection of case studies. Within the mission of the magazine, the goal of this works it to provide an “in-depth look at completed schools that employ high-performance strategies”(Architectural Record 2008) with emphasis on innovative and successful strategies.
In congruence with the architectural case study model for the academic community, both studies are presented to advance building and curriculum theory. The Rosa Parks School highlights a method of collaboration between entities to control costs by limiting redundancies, although the crucial process of working together between the school board, designers, and the boys and girls club was hardly outlined. This case study did, however, provide new information in that regard. The other major issue of the project – the extensive use of daylighting, however, is hardly novel to the architectural community. The Fossil Ridge High School facility is over 300,000 square feet and the case study touts the concept of creating three distinct learning areas within the footprint. However, the process of designing the spaces and their realized effectiveness is given short-shrift. The second major amenity of the building is its environmentally conscious building systems. Here, the case study does well in documenting a particular case in which the daylighting systems provided too much illumination at times.
For architectural practitioners these short case studies introduce greater concepts of flexibility, collaboration, environmental sustainability and development of community that can be inspirational, but they do not provide the in-depth coverage nor do they discuss implementation of curriculum at a comprehensive level.
Researcher, interactions and intended audience
B.J. Novitski (2008) is managing editor of ArchitectureWeek publication and he brings that experience working for a commercial trade magazine to the projects. He conducted interviews, obtained construction documents, compiled photographs and collected data. He discovered from acquaintance with the Rosa Parks educators that “many of the buildings' high-tech and high-performance features also serve to instill in students an awareness of their surroundings” (Architectural Record 2008). In the Fossil Ridge High school, B.J. Novitski learned from a teacher that the she felt a strong sense of communitiy from the students due to the building layout and Novitski conjectured that some studens may enter the architectural profession because of exposure to this new facility . Joann Gonchar (2008) concludes that “each of the schools, in its own way, establishes a strong connection between building and context” (Architectural Record 2008). Each case study is approximately 1000 words in length and includes photographs, list of project team members, and manufacturers of major products and building systems. For instance, the Rosa Parks school case study lists the owner, architect, general contractor and building consultants. It also accredits the masonry subcontractor, painter and manufacturers of the curtainwall, acoustical ceiling, paint and coating, kitchen appliances, resilient flooring and carpet. This group of constituents is presumably the case study audience. Adjacent to the case study are advertisements for building products and materials.
Establishing credibility for the case study
Due to the format of this case study, it seems unlikely that the case study serves to discover unsuccessful elements of the building projects to hold up the deficiencies to the architectural community and its associated entities. Data is presented to support some of the quantitative performance but no further research information is given to substantiate either learning performance enhanced by the built environment or affectation derived from it.
Friday, July 15, 2022
Architectural Case Study Models for Education Facilities
Architectural Case Study Models
(COPYRIGHT © 2022 MIKAEL POWELL. All Rights Reserved)
Like Stake’s(1997) assessment, there are several claims to a model for architectural case studies. One is an academic version developed from architecture and design practitioners in a university setting. Another is developed in a commercial environment for practitioners directly involved in the architecture and construction industry.
Purpose of architectural case study for the academic community
Dr. Dilanthi Amaratunga, director of the Research Institute for the Built and Human Environment at the University of Salford (Amaratunga & Baldry 2001) concurs with Stake’s (1997) understanding of the requirements of case study that examine the process of a singular instance. Amaratunga & Baldry (2001) go on to write that in architetecture “case studies are tailor made for exploring new processes or behaviours or ones which are little understood. In this sense, case studies have an important function in generating hypotheses and building theory in built environment research” (p. 13).
Amaratunga & Baldry describe philosophies of conducting architectural research. “In research design, therefore, the issue then becomes not whether one has uniformly adhered to prescribed canons of either logical positivism or phenomenology but whether one has made sensible methods decisions given the purpose of the study, the questions being investigated, and the resources available”(p.3). A case study is interpretive– It does not need to control behavioral events in the case. It reports and interprets. It can be positivistic or phenomenological and she argues that mixed methods can make environmental behavioral research better when it is suitable for the research question. Ultimately, the purpose of case study research is to add to existing knowledge in a way that advances understanding by providing a solution or asking better questions. Amaratunga & Baldry say that a case study should not be used to reinforce a known fact, rather, this type of research “is able to draw on inductive methods of research, which aim to build theory and generate hypotheses rather than primarily to test them” (p. 14).
Purpose of architectural case study for practitioners
Architectural Record (2006), a national award-winning magazine, is a commercial publication that has a circulation of over 70,000 and is a publication of the American Institute of Architects, a non-profit organization of the architectural community that has over 300 state and local chapters throughout the United States. The magazine has been published for over a century and the “core mission of Architectural Record is to educate and inspire its audience” (Architectural Record 2009a). Regularly published case studies present “a comprehensive look into construction goals, plans and implementation. The very best of analyses, case studies and write ups by expert architects– the magazine has to be a special read” (Architectural Record 2009b).
The intended recipients are design students, and those individuals involved in the architecture industry around the world. With these two models in mind, the following is a collection of architectural case studies.
Architectural Record magazine published a collection of exemplary schools designed and constructed in the 21st century. These schools are meant to be an examples of both environmentally sustainable architecture and buildings designed to meet the needs of students in a community context. Both schools have achieved the certification of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), the non-profit organization that rates the environmental performance of buildings. Educators in these schools say that the environmentally conscious building systems in the facilities heighten awareness of the environment for students and instill a since of stewardship. Moreover, the design of the spaces incorporates daylighting for better illumination. Of the collection of case studies, I will focus on two schools - the Rosa Parks School, in Portland, Oregon, and Fossil Ridge High School in Fort Collins, Colorado, both authored by B.J. Novitski (2008).
The Rosa Parks School is a kindergarten through sixth grade facility for 550 students in a renovated subsidized housing complex. This case study exemplifies collaboration between the public housing authority, school district and private non-profit youth organizations to create one shared facility. (See youth organization section in attachment 2). In addition, it is designed with the maximum use of daylighting to illuminate spaces.
The Fossil Ridge High School is in the Poudre School District in Fort Collins, Colorado. This school is exemplary because it has a large square footage and yet it accommodates a divided curriculum that is separated into three distinct learning communities.
Purpose of the collection of architectural case studies
Joann Gonchar AIA (2008), a senior editor who focuses on building science and technology issues at Architectural Record, writes the introduction to collection of case studies. Within the mission of the magazine, the goal of this works it to provide an “in-depth look at completed schools that employ high-performance strategies”(Architectural Record 2008) with emphasis on innovative and successful strategies.
In congruence with the architectural case study model for the academic community, both studies are presented to advance building and curriculum theory. The Rosa Parks School highlights a method of collaboration between entities to control costs by limiting redundancies, although the crucial process of working together between the school board, designers, and the boys and girls club was hardly outlined. This case study did, however, provide new information in that regard. The other major issue of the project – the extensive use of daylighting, however, is hardly novel to the architectural community. The Fossil Ridge High School facility is over 300,000 square feet and the case study touts the concept of creating three distinct learning areas within the footprint. However, the process of designing the spaces and their realized effectiveness is given short-shrift. The second major amenity of the building is its environmentally conscious building systems. Here, the case study does well in documenting a particular case in which the daylighting systems provided too much illumination at times.
For architectural practitioners these short case studies introduce greater concepts of flexibility, collaboration, environmental sustainability and development of community that can be inspirational, but they do not provide the in-depth coverage nor do they discuss implementation of curriculum at a comprehensive level.
Researcher, interactions and intended audience
B.J. Novitski (2008) is managing editor of ArchitectureWeek publication and he brings that experience working for a commercial trade magazine to the projects. He conducted interviews, obtained construction documents, compiled photographs and collected data. He discovered from acquaintance with the Rosa Parks educators that “many of the buildings' high-tech and high-performance features also serve to instill in students an awareness of their surroundings” (Architectural Record 2008). In the Fossil Ridge High school, B.J. Novitski learned from a teacher that the she felt a strong sense of communitiy from the students due to the building layout and Novitski conjectured that some studens may enter the architectural profession because of exposure to this new facility . Joann Gonchar (2008) concludes that “each of the schools, in its own way, establishes a strong connection between building and context” (Architectural Record 2008). Each case study is approximately 1000 words in length and includes photographs, list of project team members, and manufacturers of major products and building systems. For instance, the Rosa Parks school case study lists the owner, architect, general contractor and building consultants. It also accredits the masonry subcontractor, painter and manufacturers of the curtainwall, acoustical ceiling, paint and coating, kitchen appliances, resilient flooring and carpet. This group of constituents is presumably the case study audience. Adjacent to the case study are advertisements for building products and materials.
Establishing credibility for the case study
Due to the format of this case study, it seems unlikely that the case study serves to discover unsuccessful elements of the building projects to hold up the deficiencies to the architectural community and its associated entities. Data is presented to support some of the quantitative performance but no further research information is given to substantiate either learning performance enhanced by the built environment or affectation derived from it.
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