The last drawing on the famous blackboard – relating studio teaching to design research

The history of the relationship of studio teaching to research since the Oxford Conference has been one of babies thrown out with bathwater. Nearly 40 years on the need for research to underpin and invigorate the acts of designing is ever more keenly felt. This paper starts from a belief that the fruitful linkage of the two requires new approaches to both – that the past 40 years shows that it does not happen automatically. Designing is considered as a series of tangible acts where the nature of each operation affects not just the outcome of the project but also the intention of the designer. This puts a renewed emphasis on the means and tools of designing, on the need for operative theories which avoid reductivism and to explore the difficulty of transforming an intention into an architectural hypothesis.