The Products of Practice collective research framework is a multi-year digital humanities project in which students build upon the work of their predecessors in the preceding run of the course. Like Wikipedia, the research is refined and expanded each year as a living web-based repository pointing toward the story of architecture practice. 

Each year students edit and refine the research framework and the archive of information it holds to assemble a loose but collective understanding of architecture practice as it has evolved into its current state of capacity and agency. Each product of practice is articulated as a body of instrumentation and broken out into “sub-products” definitions, the essential territories of production that assemble to make up a coherent mode of instrumentation. For example, architects produce drawings to convey architectural intelligence. Over time, codified formats of drawing, such as orthographic projection and constructed perspectives, have waxed and waned in concert with evolving technologies and the changing structures of labor that convey drawings into built form.

The ways in which our products of practice changes impact our relationship with society. For example, the emergence of the modern architect in the early renaissance signaled one such change: While the medieval master builder produced both designs and buildings by overseeing territories of construction craft defined by the guild system, the intellectual architect evolving out of the renaissance distanced themself from the crafts of construction, thereby eliminating the building as a product of the architect, by definition. During this time codified forms of drawing evolved to separate the spheres of design from those of construction, and to assist in communication between the distinct territories of knowledge and action. 

A shared format for data collection and visualization illustrates such changes over time, thereby showing the ways in which the practice of architecture is a non-fixed temporal social construct, malleable and open to future change. Researchers have explored different formats of visualization since the beginning of the project in 2020. Current visualization efforts involve the construction of data sets that assemble to yield a “fingerprint” of each product of practice. The fingerprints visually depict a loose chronology of transformations in each form of instrumentation as it has evolved over time. Each product of practice is also affiliated with a gallery of images, a bibliography, and a set of individual student perspectives and opinions in the form of editorial essays on focused individual research topics.

Please reach out to Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti with inquiries.