Architects - (Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge) by Thomas Yarrow (Paperback)

About the Book

"This book portrays the lives and work of 10 architects who comprise the Millar Howard Workshop architectural firm based in the Cotswolds in the United Kingdom. Focusing on their activities and their work environment, Yarrow's book is narrative driven, full of stories of anxiety, exhilaration, hope, idealism, friendship, conflict and its resolution, and the many personal commitments that propel the acts of creativity essential to good architecture and design. Taking up recent calls to "personalise the expert," the book contains insights into architectural and design practice, situating these in relation to broader themes including creativity, ethical self-formation and organisational practice. Through ethnographic descriptions of everyday working life, the book reveals the complex and contradictory imperatives that shape architectural design, and highlights the negotiations involved in efforts to resolve these. These accounts demonstrate how ideas are imaginatively produced through shifting configurations of people, materials, tools and places. Rather than deconstructing understandings of creative individuality, the account traces how this is understood and enacted through practices that are shaped by, even as they question the ideal"--

Book Synopsis

What is creativity? What is the relationship between work life and personal life? How is it possible to live truthfully in a world of contradiction and compromise? These deep and deeply personal questions spring to the fore in Thomas Yarrow's vivid exploration of the life of architects. Yarrow takes us inside the world of architects, showing us the anxiety, exhilaration, hope, idealism, friendship, conflict, and the personal commitments that feed these acts of creativity.

Architects rethinks "creativity," demonstrating how it happens in everyday practice. It highlights how the pursuit of good architecture, relates to the pursuit of a good life in intimate and individually specific ways. And it reveals the surprising and routine social negotiations through which designs and buildings are actually made.

Review Quotes

So rather than unlocking any finished design for us to copy, this book opens the potential for anthropologists and ethnographers to find meaning in the mundane, the high-value things that move us beyond imagination. That is where the magic resides.

-- "Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute"

There is a good deal that we can recognise--and take comfort from--in Yarrow's portrait. Much of this is in the charmingly ramshackle way we conduct ourselves. Yarrow reminds us why [architects] persist with this badly paid, insecure struggle of practice... as a way of being in the world and to help us understand our place in it. This is an unusually human book.

--Piers Taylor "Architecture Today"

About the Author

Thomas Yarrow is a social anthropologist whose work focuses on the social life of expertise. He is particularly interested in everyday interactions through which professional knowledge is produced, the personal and ideological commitments that propel this work, and the routine ethical dilemmas that arise. For Architects, Yarrow turned his attention to the lives and work of ten architects who comprise the Millar Howard Workshop, an architectural firm in the Cotswolds, UK. Yarrow is also the author of Development Beyond Politics, and the co-author of Detachment, Differentiating Development, and Archaeology and Anthropology.