Gribble, Emma Louise;
(2024)
Architectural briefing and argumentation:
an instrumental case study on the new university
campus at UCL East (RIBA Stages 1-3).
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
Best practice guidance on architectural briefing makes two commonly accepted recommendations: the design team should have a single point of contact with the client ‘to prevent any misunderstanding or cross communication’, and there should be ‘early and on-going engagement with end users’ to ensure that new buildings meet the needs of the people who will use them. However, there is scant research into how these two apparently contradictory pieces of advice are reconciled in practice. This thesis, is a study of the briefing process for a new university campus on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London. It asks how internal stakeholders engage with the briefing process in the early stages of architectural projects (RIBA Stages 1-3) and focusses on intra-client argumentation. The research methodology is Situational Analysis and the research methods are interviews with key stakeholders, non-participant observation of project meetings and document analysis. Internal stakeholders were found to differ on a number of issues including the decision to build, the strategic brief, project governance and the virtual building (the developing building design), and there were many ways in which things could have been otherwise. Stakeholders deployed a variety of strategies and tactics to justify or contest design decisions and enrolled a heterogenous range of actors such as contaminated soil, specialist teaching practices and university strategy documents to support their positions. This thesis argues that architectural briefing is an inherently social process and draws on insights from diverse scholars to develop a conceptual framework which links three interrelated aspects of architectural projects: the strategic brief, project governance, and the virtual building to nine areas of potential disagreement – areas where argumentation may inform design outcomes. Finally, it proposes a set of sensitising questions based on this framework to support practitioner and client reflection-in-action (Schön 1991).
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Architectural briefing and argumentation: an instrumental case study on the new university campus at UCL East (RIBA Stages 1-3) |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2023. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > The Bartlett School of Architecture |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10188922 |
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