On: Case Study Strategies for Architects and Designers

Abstract

slightly modified version of Yin’s original definition of a case study to highlight architecture’s focus on the built environment: “A case study is an empirical inquiry that investigates a phenomenon or setting within its real-life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident.” It is not difficult to see that buildings and cities exemplify that kind of complexly embedded phenomenon, and both Yin and Groat and Wang used Jane Jacobs’ seminal work Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) to illustrate the use of multiple forms of documentation and data in a specific case study to develop and support a general thesis about the city. The most recent contribution to the literature on case study research in architecture is a somewhat uneven book by Marja Sarvimäki, Case Study Strategies for Architects and Designers (2018), which synthesizes material from Yin, Groat and Wang, and others. The book is organized in three main sections. The first section addresses the history and theory of case studies; the second, types of case studies; and the third, methods for evaluating them. The first two sections follow much of the material in Groat and Wang, though they draw more widely on the case study literature from other fields and expand the treatment of methods for evaluating and establishing the validity of case studies. The unevenness of the book appears in the introduction of a confusing argument for Actor Network Theory (ANT) as a theoretical basis for the treatment of nonWestern cultures in Critical Regionalism, with which the book concludes. Not only is ANT mistakenly attributed to Michel Foucault, but the well-known catalogue of animals Foucault cited in his preface to The Order of Things (1971) is presented as an authentic Chinese account and not as a fictional construction by Jorge Luis Borges from his 1942 essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” itself meant to reveal the cultural specificity of language and other descriptions of the world. Sarvimäki has clearly immersed herself in the case study literature, so the book serves as a useful introduction and commentary on those methods for design educators. That literature was explicitly developed to distinguish qualitative methods from the powerful quantitative methods used in the sciences. The explanations in the originals are often clearer than Sarvimäki’s, though she translates them into terms familiar to designers. A great deal of the original literature is devoted to categorical distinctions meant to help researchers determine what a particular case study will reveal, which methods are appropriate, and how to judge and present the results. There is much in the work useful for architectural research. The most fundamental category is the general paradigm or system of inquiry within which the researcher operates. Sarvimäki largely adopts the three categories used by Groat and Wang: “(1) positivist/post-positivist, (2) intersubjective, and (3) constructivist paradigms along the continuum from objective to subjective.” Yin called it a continuum between realist and relative, but all the authors are careful to distinguish the range of these paradigms from the simplistic opposition between quantitative and qualitative. This continuum is often used to separate hard from soft sciences, but really only describes data collection methods. In the field of architecture, these distinctions in methods are frequently identified with our subdisciplines, with inquiries focused on technology, design, or history and theory, but examining them explicitly reveals the many exceptions to that convention. Within each paradigm or system of inquiry, there are still choices to be made about the type of case study to use and the methods for investigating a particular research question. The two classic types described in the literature are embedded and holistic, with the term “embedded” used to describe the general class of studies focused on the interaction between a “phenomenon or setting” and its context, using a variety of methods—quantitative and/or qualitative—while the term “holistic” draws on the philosophical approaches of hermeneutics and phenomenology to “understand phenomena in their totality or situ where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” (61). In either case, the structure of the case study is constrained by its purpose—by whether it is meant to be explanatory, descriptive, or exploratory. The final step in case study research is the matter of evaluation, interpretation, and presentation: how to use the Case Study Strategies for Architects and Designers