When I presented an early version of my research on tacit knowledge in the design studio, the architectural historian Mark Jarzombek compared it to tracking a snark. In Lewis Carroll’s poem, The Hunting of the Snark (1876), the crew ‘sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care; / They pursued it with forks and hope’, only for it to slip away, extinguishing one of them in the escape. Meaning is so loosely tied to the written word that Henry Holiday, the first edition’s illustrator, drew Care and Hope as the eleventh and twelfth crew members. Despite listing five characteristics of the beast — among them ‘its habit of getting up late’, and ‘its fondness for bathing-machines’ — there is no illustration of the snark itself at all.
I wondered what Jarzombek meant. Was tacit knowledge really as dangerous, as elusive, as this nonsensical creature? Michael Polanyi, the scientist–philosopher who first named tacit knowledge, located it in designing a ‘harmonious … architectural composition’, without being able to articulate precisely why its geometry is appealing, or how the distribution of solid and void makes us experience awe over another emotion, such as comfort. There remained ‘a personal component, inarticulate and passionate’.
We often know where this ‘component’ is, without knowing what it is.
Approach it directly — try to pin it down, define it, tell it — and it wriggles away from us again.
While Polanyi did attempt to articulate the precise nature of tacit knowledge elsewhere in his writing,
the sociologist Harry Collins still thought he went too far in emphasising its individual, ‘mystical and inspirational’ qualities.
Collins argued it was more straightforward. Only ‘collective’ knowledge was truly tacit because it was context-specific, dependent on a web of changing reference points within a community. Meanwhile, in architectural education, Polanyi’s term has been cited for phenomena from the intuition of designing and the role of our body in drawing to the way studios socialise students into architectural culture.
These positions are not all contradictory, but merely hint at the spread of the term.
Now I see Jarzombek’s comment as a warning. Like the snark, in this sense at least, tacit knowledge is mercurial: variously social, embodied, intimate, and emotional; often unconscious or unspoken; entangling individuals and collectives. Ultimately, the philosopher Marjorie Grene thought that, irrespective of these epistemological debates, in practice tacit knowledge is so natural we hardly notice it, except in ‘the boundary situation: confrontation with frameworks basically different from our own’.
Rather than defining the nature of tacit knowledge, then, better to work out how to pursue it without losing ourselves chasing shadows. Everything can seem like tacit knowledge when you start looking for it.
This essay recounts two hunts for tacit knowledge, in those ‘boundary situations’ where tacit knowledge is articulated and negotiated. In one, I found myself drawn to the realistic models in Studio Caruso at ETH Zurich, untangling their various receptions through autoethnography. In the other, I struggled to understand a design charette set for a summer workshop in 1986, the International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD), until we reenacted it in 2021. Students became part of a studio over an entire semester, and their encounters with outsiders, like myself or a guest critic, were hardly the same as the month-long encounter between schools at an intensive workshop. Moreover, these are admittedly partial accounts, focused on tacit knowledge specifically, rather than complete histories. Despite these disclaimers, observing tacit knowledge across these diverging circumstances might help us grasp its mechanics and qualities in other encounters in architectural education.
The crew had thimbles and forks; I need tools of my own. After all, histories of architectural education, focused on published documents, have often struggled with the embodied and unwritten: to bridge the boundaries of tacit knowledge between researchers and the communities they study.
For this reason, I turned to autoethnography, acknowledging how I saw Caruso’s models through my architectural training in Australia. Meanwhile, separated by temporality as much as culture, reenactment allowed us to experience ILAUD as participants might have in 1986. Like this by-now belaboured metaphor of chasing the snark, these tools beat a path towards the untellable.
ETH Autoethnography
The models we assembled at the University of Queensland (UQ) were nothing like those made famous by Adam Caruso’s studio at ETH, or by Caruso St. John, the office he founded with Peter St John. Ours were abstract, stripped back to a few materials: balsa wood, grey card, tree twigs, little else. We were told to limit colour and never represent the pattern of individual tiles. This was considered tacky, a sign of the amateur; suitable for model train enthusiasts, not budding architects.
We were hardly alone in thinking this way. Models have been characterised by material abstraction since the Renaissance. Ever since, architects have tended to follow Alberti’s advice: ‘better that the models are not accurately finished, refined, and highly decorated, but plain and simple, so they demonstrate the ingenuity of him who conceived the idea, and not the skill of one who fabricated the model’.
When a model becomes too gaudy, craft outshines the architectural intent.
So, it was shocking to see photographs of Caruso St John’s models. My first serious boyfriend, notorious for flouting the conventions of the school, had proffered a copy of El Croquis, disintegrating at the edges from overuse, as if inducting me into a cult. And the realism of these images was a revelation. A glimpse of the interior model for the Veemgebouw in Eindhoven — marbled floor tiles so gleaming they reflected the foyer’s blue columns (Fig. 10.1) — was enough to reveal that our models at UQ were not neutral, as they had seemed, but a deliberately constructed architectural orientation. They suited a mode of regional modernism, indebted to Queensland’s timber-and-tin vernacular.
At first, their appeal was inextricable from my ex, but they intrigued me even after we broke up. Months later, I still found myself poring over Pinterest, which returns an astonishing number of images when you search ‘Caruso + ETH’. Part of our fascination, I think, was that we could not imagine how to make such delicate models. Even if we overcame our drilled-in suspicion of tile patterns, we lacked the skill to make them shine the right way.
Such intimacy is important for autoethnography, and for writing tacit knowledge. Autoethnography can test theories of tacit knowledge against a researcher’s embodied and social perspective, which remains elusive when relying on explicit testimony from others.
There is an ideological dimension in positioning ‘the particular experiences of individuals in tension with dominant expressions of discursive power’,
similar to Grene’s account of how we judge, tacitly. When she wonders why she reacts so strongly to a red geranium, she remembers her ‘mother’s dislike of that red in children’s clothing, [and] my surprise when she herself appeared in … the forbidden colour’.
Moving from one community, UQ, to another, ETH, my tacit knowledge is also my own.
The photographs of Caruso St John’s models are composed to test design as much as represent it. They explore atmospheres, simulating lighting conditions, staking a polemical position in favour of surface and material. Caruso has argued they come closer to human vision than the singular perspective of renderings.
In other details they are abstract, intentionally caught between life-size and miniature.
Against those immaculate tiles, the cut-out figure in the Veemgebouw model is incongruously crude. This play of scales has become a calling card for the firm, and for Studio Caruso at ETH.
Figure 10.1: Model Photograph of the Veemgebouw, Eindhoven, 2007. Reproduced with the permission of Caruso St John Architects.
Caruso’s is one of the ETH’s best-known studios. I asked students why they chose it, and they often told me something related to this reputation. I wondered how they learned to make their models; they said there were no classes teaching the technique. They worked it out by consulting the online studio archive, asking friends how they did the fiddly bits. One student I talked to in 2020, who transferred for his master’s, was doubly disappointed: with COVID forcing the studioonline, he struggled with his model. Without it, he wondered, only half-joking, how friends in Germany would know he had attended the studio at all.
These models did not flourish at ETH without precedent: their pedigree dates to an older tradition there. Caruso has written of his interest in the ‘Analogue Architecture’ that emerged from the school in the 1970s: a design process combining references, or analogies, from architectural history and popular culture alike, indebted to Venturi Scott Brown and Aldo Rossi, who was guest professor in 1972–74 and 1977–78. In the studio of Fabio Reinhardt, assisted by Miroslav Šik, students laboured over enormous, atmospheric perspectives.
For Caruso, they were ‘magnificent … precisely executed in Jaxon pastels and containing more than a hint of Hopper, De Chirico and even Marvel comics’.
Caruso and St John were among a group of London architects — alongside Tony Fretton and Jonathan Sergison — who, in the 1990s, had looked back to this Swiss lineage, even as some Swiss architects had begun to drift away from it.
When Caruso arrived at ETH in 2007, he brought an admiration for these Analogue perspectives and their approach to reference and context, nurtured and distorted abroad. At the same time, he and St John worried it had become less convincing in an age of ubiquitous digital renders.
They turned to model photography as an alternative. What is less well-known is that, in the early years of Studio Reinhardt, students also constructed ‘models with detailed interiors like dollhouses’,
photographed from the eye-level of a would-be visitor. Cladding panels were individually modelled and coloured; one student constructed a model in concrete, claiming this was the only way to represent its texture.
Though their careful treatment of light and surface was strikingly similar, in this sense they differed from Studio Caruso, where models are made from paper treated to resemble only a material. Their constructions in card are not only used to produce images, but act as form of intuitive design research: modelling precedent projects, translating their qualities into their own designs without explicit explanation.
Nevertheless, the models found fertile ground in the school where their effect, if not their process, was not unknown. There are artists to add to this loose genealogy, too, particularly Thomas Demand, who photographs full-size paper models of disorderly offices and other sites of human activity. I could speculate that looking outside architecture, or to idiosyncratic moments in its past, helped Caruso St John overcome disciplinary conventions of material abstraction.
In a 2020 Studio Caruso crit, one guest was less dazzled. ‘I know the studio loves its models to follow Demand et cetera, but there have been moments in looking at models, and I think, is this a good use of these people’s time, to make tiny hangers and clothes?’
With these hangers, suspended along a corridor, would someone steal the coats, she asked, or did the project assume a fantasy where this did not happen? Another critic wondered whether a room really reminded him of an empty stage set — in the provisional way new buildings often seem poised for future action — or whether it was a quality of the model alone. With all this labour, the critics implied, students had not always spent enough time considering the world they were creating: echoing Alberti, the models perhaps outpaced their maker’s intentions.
Caruso replied, ‘there’s no pressure to do it. You know, I mean, some people do’. The reputation of these models has grown so great that Caruso has questioned whether they have become their own orthodoxy.
Still, the culture of a studio can be hard to change. Sociologists might call this a self-reinforcing path dependence: ‘an institutional pattern [that] delivers increasing benefits with its continued adoption, and thus over time it becomes more and more difficult to transform the pattern … even if these alternative options would have been more “efficient”’.
In Studio Caruso, students and assistants continue to expect these models, irrespective of how much work they require, to possess momentum beyond the control of anyone, Caruso added.
Conflicts have flared around these models outside the studio too. In 2007, Caruso St John collaborated with Thomas Demand on a competition for a restaurant and toilet to enliven the underpass at Escher Wyss Platz in Zurich. They proposed a replica of a so-called Nail House photographed in Chongquing, left stranded amidst a construction site when its owners refused to sell. As we might expect, the model was in brightly coloured paper, complete with lanterns and tiny chairs. The difference this time was that the building would retain some of these qualities: its finished walls dimpled and painted like cardboard, as if this full-sized building were a scale model of the Chinese original.
The Swiss People’s Party (SVP) were incensed, coordinating a ballot initiative to block this use of public funds. Where one critic thought it succeeded on this difficult site ‘by insisting, despite all its functionality, on its character as a foreign body … through its unusual wooden architecture with amateurish painting’,
another dubbed it a ‘dreary hut’.
An SVP poster proclaimed it ‘5.9 million for a shithouse’, leveraging its indexical qualities — replicating a real building, one material mimicking another — to characterise the project as both banal and expensively artistic, rather than as essential infrastructure. Reversing the office’s usual models, where something small looks large, its scale and surface seemed to confound Zurich voters. The ballot succeeded, and Escher Wyss Platz remains empty today.
In a final twist, the Nagelhaus reappeared at the 2010 Venice Biennale. Here, it was viewed by practitioners, academics, critics, and an engaged public already familiar with the work of Caruso St John and Demand and a history of exhibiting 1:1 building fragments.
In this new context, before another community, the project was read as daring and intriguing — as those student models had seemed to me — not profligate.
Of course, a temporary installation, public artwork, and student model differ. Still, it seems to me, their wildly diverging receptions relate to a common ambiguity of realism and scale, running against Albertian norms. They carry within them histories, ideologies, and skills, many of them unarticulated. In Studio Caruso, they are routine; when we encounter them outside this community, as part of another like mine at UQ, their unusualness exposes our expectations for all models. We might not even realise we have these tacit expectations until we see them confirmed or challenged.
Reenacting ILAUD
From the first workshop in 1976, ILAUD was an experiment in cross-institutional education and cooperation. It brought together students and teachers from several European and North American schools to work on design projects in sunny Italian cities — first in Urbino, later Sienna, San Marino, and Venice — alongside site visits and guest lectures from luminaries including Gae Aulenti and Peter Smithson. In this, it resembled the ‘carefree holiday and travel atmosphere’ of other summer schools.
Yet, as its founder Giancarlo De Carlo wrote, ILAUD distinguished itself as a ‘laboratory’ of architectural and urban design research, where new methods and theories could be tested. Its programme extended beyond the semester break through intermediate seminars and the ‘permanent activities’, prepared in advance by each school on a given theme, with all projects and discussions consolidated in the annual reports. It attempted to do all this without traditional educational hierarchies, ‘the only distinction being that some would be senior, others junior researchers’.
Participants from each school arrived with their own attitudes to design; one of the recurring challenges was stabilising a shared ILAUD ‘platform’.
In the early years, differences between the schools — particularly a long-running debate over competing theories of user participation
— sometimes exploded into dramatic scenes. De Carlo recalled reviews becoming ‘tense, often angry or at least frustrated, and to develop a discussion projected towards the future proves to be almost impossible’.
Nevertheless, over time, the organisation developed a common understanding of its host cities and increasingly nuanced definitions of its recurring themes. By 1986, De Carlo declared that ILAUD was ‘running rather smoothly … with remarkable competence’.
1986 is also where my bewilderment begins, with the introduction of two novelties. The workshop tested a three-day charette exercise as the first step in a renovation of the Santa Maria della Scala hospital in Sienna. It was guided by a new design method communicated through a ‘cartesian grid whose ordinates describe a system of conceptual issues, and whose abscissae describe a system of places’.
This grid was crossed with diagonal axes, labelled with the two conceptual themes of the workshop that year: ‘multiplicity of language’ and ‘process of transformation’. The diagram and accompanying explanation were intended to codify what ILAUD participants had learnt over the preceding three years and communicate them to incoming students, unfamiliar with the site or ILAUD itself.
The only charette project described in any detail in the 1986 annual report was an installation from the Oslo School of Architecture (AHO). A grainy photograph depicts a diaphanous curtain hung in a lightwell, one of the ‘places’ named on the abscissae, to emphasise the qualities of light in the space, one of the ordinate ‘issues’. Writing about the results when the charette was repeated the following year, the Norwegian architect Per Olaf Fjeld suggested that ‘a charette is personal. Each country assumes an identity, a method of work, a persuasion, an ideology’. With little time for conscious reflection, this instinctual, fast-paced process might reflect each school’s culture — AHO’s emphasis on phenomenology, for instance, indebted to their teacher Christian Norberg-Schulz — but Fjeld admits that ‘these first marks [are] sometimes difficult to read’.
Adding to my confusion, De Carlo devoted considerable space in his report introduction to a group of ‘five dissenting students’ who refused to work with a staff mentor. He claimed that these students — from Norway, France, and Belgium — ‘predictably enough produced nothing of interest’, and that schools should better familiarise their students with the precepts of ILAUD through the reports: ‘it’s no good students coming to the Course and wanting to study … along lines they’ve invented’.
I found it difficult to reconcile this public castigation of students with ILAUD’s professed pedagogical equality, especially given that De Carlo had advocated less-institutional, more collaborative forms of education throughout his career.
This dissonance might be attributed, charitably, to different educational expectations. In 1983, students from Norway had complained that ‘the system as it is now tends to function … antidemocratically … based on deeper cultural differences between the Italian and Norwegian way of running things’.
Their independence, encouraged at home, was received differently in Sienna; ILAUD might have been less formal than the Italian norm while still being more formal than Oslo. In a similar way, my own interpretation of De Carlo’s reaction has, perhaps, been tinged by my education in Australia, which was likewise less hierarchical than the ‘Italian way of running things’.
On the other hand, when I first encountered the grid, like these students I had not read the annual reports carefully. I found its mathematical language confusing — ordinates and abscissae — because I did not know its referents. In 1982, for instance, ILAUD had discussed ‘Multiplicity of Language’ as a pluralistic alternative to postmodern eclecticism: the appropriate expression for users and place, rather than quotation.
Although De Carlo wrote that the grid, alongside the charette, had accelerated the early phase of group work, this was only true of those already familiar with ILAUD’s approach.
For others, it remained imprecise and, unlike the charette, it was not repeated the following year. If my perplexity is any evidence, it required such intimate familiarity with ILAUD’s ‘platform’ that only De Carlo, and a handful of returning teachers, knew it well enough to guide students through it.
Using my own experience as evidence risks anachronism; it is also a kind of reenactment. For the philosopher R. G. Collingwood, ‘the historian must re-enact the past in his own mind … think it again for himself’.
Collingwood was interested in reconstructing historical thoughts, not actions, but historian Andrew Pickering suggests it is not incompatible with physical reenactment either: by repeating past actions, it becomes a form of affective evidence, approaching how historical figures felt and experienced. In architectural education, Angelika Schnell, Eva Sommeregger, Waltraud Indrist, and their students at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna pioneered reenactment as a way to investigate the somatic forms of tacit knowledge that produced particular drawings or designs.
In this sense, reenactment might unlock the emotional and embodied tacit knowledge of archival documents.
In 2021, I organised a reenactment of the charette, transposed from Sienna to Rotterdam. Over the same three-day period, we followed a modified version of the Cartesian Grid (Fig. 10.2) for a project for a new site — the Lijnbaan pedestrian street — designing ‘in character’ as one of the ILAUD schools of 1986. I surprised myself when I fell into the role of De Carlo, urging the group playing AHO, Mara Trübenbach and Emanuele De Angelis, to recreate that single installation photograph. I felt a flash of annoyance when they insisted the curtain itself was less important than its installation and effects.
In Sienna, the Norwegians had scrubbed the shaft and sought out this translucent fabric, exploring the city as they went. Trübenbach and De Angelis mirrored these experiences. First, they recorded themselves walking along the Lijnbaan, counter to the right–left flow of foot traffic, the imposition heightening their sense of the sights and sounds of the city around them. Then, in their own intervention, they bought a rope to be strung out along the Lijnbaan (‘rope walk’ in Dutch) to modify how people walked. Their final performance counterposed what AHO participants saw in 1986 with their observations in 2021. In this doubling, I could recognise the way that, for the audience in both, ‘his path was the same, he stopped … and glanced. The first transformation … was a reality’.
Figure 10.2: Modified ‘Cartesian Grid,’ 2021. Original published in Giancarlo de Carlo, “The Design Method,” in Where, Why and How: Sienna 1986 (Milan: Sagep Editrice for ILAUD, 1987), 90–91.
Other groups found the grid as perplexing as I had. Reenacting its axes and diagonals just sent us back to the reports, scrambling to understand what De Carlo meant by the ‘process of transformation’, and how this made sense within ILAUD. One group criticised the complexity of the task I had given them: combining this grid, with the imitation of a school, with an altogether new city and site. The number of shifting parameters, they complained, made the task so complicated that all they could do was try to satisfy them, with no room left for their own project.
I could have agreed that I found the grid confusing too. Instead, I again grew increasingly frustrated. I worried that, without the framework I had spent so long formulating, we would never uncover the kind of affective evidence I expected. It was only later that I realised De Carlo might have felt this way in 1986. How he might have planned an open and non-hierarchical workshop — after all, this had been my intention too — only to discover that, in all his enthusiasm, he could not bear for anyone to meddle with it. What had seemed so perplexing was, perhaps, simply a very human encounter with other humans.
We know that in 1986 participants were tasked with transforming Santa Maria della Scala; we can study their solutions, like the curtain, however badly photocopied. Between these two points, the brief and the results, things grow murkier, and more tacit. The reenactment was one attempt to peer through the gloom. So was the grid itself. It broke what ILAUD had learnt in the years before into small, explicit pieces. De Carlo thought this would speed up the messy initiation of new students, from over a month to only a few days. But read through its abstract description alone — without the experience of discussing its concepts, testing ideas, learning from each other, executing bodily skills, the emotions felt in the process, whether in Sienna or Rotterdam — the fragments could never cohere.
The Snark Redux
The snark had five characteristics; in the end, I could venture another five for tacit knowledge. One, we find tacit knowledge at the boundary between communities because a community’s boundaries are partly defined by shared tacit knowledge: what separates one studio, school, or public from another. Two, boundaries of tacit knowledge are often intangible until they coalesce around tangible objects. These objects, three, can help surmount our boundaries — becoming a common reference point — but not if they rely on explicit instructions. There is a paradox in intuiting tacit knowledge through a model or curtain, mute and open-ended, while the detailed grid left us more confused. This does not mean, four, that objects overcome all boundaries for all communities: the SVP lacked context for the Nagelhaus model, and any inclination to understand it. Boundaries of tacit knowledge exclude as readily as they define. Finally, five, tacit knowledge bounds communities but it is also personal knowledge, inseparable from the person who knows it. ILAUD and Studio Caruso are not reducible to their founders — the model persists despite Caruso’s ambivalence — but De Carlo’s emotions did affect ILAUD. This is why my methods have so emphasised my position. They underscore the way we always view the tacit knowledge of others in terms of our own.
Though I cannot claim to have seen the snark well enough to say any of this with certainty. The most we can hope for, I think, are stories like these two hunts, offering glimpses of our encounters with tacit knowledge.
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