The Products of Practice is an archive of sorts, the result of a collective and ongoing research project by graduate students in architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of  Design to explore the history and theory of architectural practice, and to speculate upon its future potentials.

We ask: What do architects actually make, and how do changes in our production and  instrumentation expand or limit our role in society? 

The research is conducted within the context of a research seminar by the same name, taught by Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti. The seminar and its catalogued output trace the dynamic dance between the shape of design practice and the society it serves through the lens of our practical instrumentation: our “products of practice.” Within the cacophony of contemporary media, under the pressures of finance and environmental ethics, and with an expectation of artificial general intelligence, this archive of student work looks to the past to explore the product of the architect as an artifact of cultural will and circumstance, framing and projecting practice potentials now and into the future. Critically tracking the evolution of architectural instrumentation through a collective research framework, the seminar closely examines the things we actually make—from drawings to specifications to the profession itself—as the cultural and temporal constructs that limit or expand the role and agency of the architect in society.