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Doing Building Work: Methods at the Interface of

Geography and Architecture geor_737 126..140

JANE M. JACOBS1*, STEPHEN CAIRNS2 and IGNAZ STREBEL3

1
School of Geosciences, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9XP, UK.
2
Future Cities Laboratory, Singapore-ETH Centre, National University Singapore, 117566
Singapore.
3
Departement Architektur, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich 8093, Switzerland.
*Corresponding author. Email: jane.jacobs@ed.ac.uk

Received 25 June 2011; Revised 13 October 2011; Accepted 1 November 2011

Abstract
This paper summarises the methodological approach taken in an interdisciplinary
project involving geographers and architects. The project charted the diverse
afterlives of the modernist-inspired, state-sponsored, residential high-rise, and did
so drawing on two cases: Red Road Estate in Glasgow and Bukit Ho Swee Estate
in Singapore. In offering a specific account of, and reflection upon, the method-
ologies used in the High-rise Project, we hope to advance the methodological
repertoire of human geography generally and contribute further to the new wave
of scholarship on geography and architecture.

KEY WORDS high-rise housing; visual methodologies; Red Road Glasgow;

Bukit Ho Swee Singapore; architecture

Introduction give to our high-rises tell you something very

For over half a decade, we have formed an inter-
disciplinary team (the High-rise Project Team)
investigating high-rises and high-rise living. The
collaboration includes two geographers (Jane
Jacobs and Ignaz Strebel, the latter of whom now
happens to work in an architecture department)
and an academic architect (Stephen Cairns).
There have also been other collaborators: student
researchers, designers and fabricators, curators,
artists, residents, housing activists and officials,
and high-rise workers. Through our research we
have tried to rethink the history and current
fortunes of one specific building type: the
modernist-inspired, residential high-rise of state-
sponsored mass housing schemes. You can see,
from the many qualifiers we put around our
architectural type of the ‘high-rise’ – modernist-
inspired, residential, state-sponsored mass
housing – that we are already talking about
something that is more complicated than a mere
building type. At the very least, the qualifiers we
specific about their place in history (modern),
their politics (welfarist), and their function
(housing), as well as their style (modernist).
However, as we will show, we have been inter-
ested not simply in seeing inside a predefined
building type. We have been interested in the
processes that stabilise something called a high-
rise as a socio-material entity or a building event.
As part of this project we have done a great
deal of empirical work, across two specific high-
rise housing contexts: Glasgow (where the high-
rise is at the end of its life as a social housing
solution) and Singapore (where it is being
renewed and built to higher and higher specifica-
tions). In both these contexts, we did detailed
studies of two specific high-rise blocks. Both
blocks were part of estates designed and con-
structed in the 1960s as part of state-sponsored,
mass housing schemes addressing what were
considered to be local housing emergencies. Our
building biographies (Blunt, 2008) capture the

126 Geographical Research • May 2012 • 50(2):126–140

doi: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2011.00737.x

J.M. Jacobs et al.: Methods at the Interface of Geography and Architecture
coincident complexity of two high-rise buildings
that, while conceived out of the same kind of
housing vision, materialised and stabilised in two
quite different settings. The first biography is of
213/183/153 Petershill Drive, on the Red Road
housing estate in Glasgow (Figure 1). This block,
along with the rest of the estate, was earmarked
for demolition in 2005 and is currently subject to
a pull-down demolition. The second is of Block
22 Bukit Ho Swee Estate, Singapore (Figure 2).
This block was not so recently refurbished and
continues on as a fully functional and occupied
high-rise.
In selecting these two case studies we wanted
to capture a self-evident repetition that resulted
in self-evidently different outcomes. The images
in Figures 1 and 2 capture well one compelling
dimension of this logic of repetition, this being
the formal look of the buildings. We can see from
these images that these buildings are alike insofar
as they are multi-storey high-rises and each, in
their own way, expresses an interpretation of the
modernist architectural idiom. However, we can
also see they are different, and the differences we
might read off the buildings formalistically (from
how they look) are meagre expressions of a more
diverse set of differentiating logics. Indeed, as
one of the team (Jacobs, 2006) has noted, formal-
ism (like typology) is a limited analytical tool
with respect to understanding any architecture
(see also Guggenheim, 2009 on typology). For
example, we might label these different but
similar outcomes, as they have been by popular
and political discourses, a high-rise housing
‘failure’ (the high-rise, mass housing of the UK)
and a high-rise housing ‘success’ (the high-rise,
mass housing of Singapore). Such accounts of
Figure 1 213/183/153 Petershill Drive, Red Road Glasgow.
Source: The High-rise Project Team.
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127
high-rise difference are well established and
draw largely on evaluations of distinct national
housing policy frameworks, with their different
levels of investment and their different systems
of management. Our work does not dispute the
relevance of those policy accounts of high-rise
success and failure in these two settings. Rather,
it has sought to subsidise these accounts by offer-
ing an alternative mode of thinking about these
high-rises: one that offers a finer-grained grasp of
the diversified assemblages of power and prac-
tice that gives rise not only to the high-rise as a
material thing but also to its variable states of
success or failure. In our study, we have set these
two case studies alongside each other not in
pursuit of a systematic comparison but more as a
rhetorical gesture that captures two distinct tra-
jectories in the varied afterlives of the state-
sponsored residential high-rise.
From the outset, we have talked about our
work as being an investigation into architecture
not as a formal, fixed thing, nor even as a
meaning-filled, human claimed, symbolic thing,
Figure 2 Block 22 Bukit Ho Swee, Singapore.
Source: The High-rise Project Team.

128
but as a building event. Our work has always
tried to see architecture as eventful, vital, and
performative, much more than simply a built
context for human action and more than a mere
product of human action. The project’s space-
clearing essay on ‘big (architectural) things’
used the term building events to describe how
we could no longer usefully think of architec-
ture in terms previously relied upon (Jacobs,
2006). That essay aspired to establish a number
of new facts about architecture, which we hoped
would reshape the way in which geographies of
architecture could be conducted. The essay con-
tained a number of related propositions. The
first proposition was that architecture is not
comprised of inert matter but of materials that
had agencies of various kinds. This is a propo-
sition that is not, as it might at first sound, a
return to environmental determinism but rather
one that sought to move scholarship towards a
vital materialism and an associated notion of
distributed agency (Bennett, 2010). The second
proposition was that what matters about archi-
tecture and buildings is not simply meaning, as
expressed in the order of the symbolic and in
human attachment to that order. In a more-than-
representational move, we assumed semiotic or
symbolic readings of architecture were unable to
account for all that matters about it. The third
proposition was that architectural materialisa-
tions are the consequence of socio-technical
gatherings or assemblages and that such assem-
blages or gatherings are contingently formed
and necessarily unstable. Our aim was to
establish that the materiality of a building is
a relational effect, that its ‘thing-ness’ is an
achievement of a diverse gathering of contin-
gently formed associates and associations. The
work of the High-rise Project Team has sought
to elaborate this relational rethink of architec-
ture through empirical instances. Our study has
assumed that buildings are always in process
and part of a socio-technical realm of practice,
which is both quotidian and routine but also
always political and power laden and potentially
spectacular. Conceived of in this way, a building
is always being ‘made’ or ‘unmade’, always
doing the work of holding together or pulling
apart. In this incessant shuffling of heteroge-
neous relations, what the high-rise is can never
be contained simply within its concrete form,
nor fully scripted by the visions and efforts that
give rise to it. This approach to architecture has
much in common with recent attention to built
forms from Science and Technology Studies
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Geographical Research • May 2012 • 50(2):126–140
(see as examples only, Gieryn, 2002; Latour and
Yaneva, 2008; Yaneva, 2009, Guggenheim,
2009; Guggenheim and Söderström 2010), as
well as the new wave of ethnographically
inspired geographies of architecture (see as
indicative examples, Lees, 2001; Imrie, 2003;
Llewellyn, 2003; Jacobs, 2006; Jacobs et al.,
2007; Kraftl and Adey, 2008; Jones, 2009;
McNeill, 2009; Kraftl, 2010; Jacobs and Cairns,
2011; Rose et al., 2010; Imrie and Street, 2011;
Strebel, 2011), and recent thinking in architec-
ture itself (Brand, 1995; Hollis, 2009; Till,
2009).
The concept of a building event seeks to
animate architecture. It is, of course, one thing to
animate one’s theoretical stance in relation to an
object of analysis, but how does one capture this
eventfulness and communicate it in the pages of
a web site or the even less accommodating pages
of an academic journal such as this? Our theo-
retical propositions have, from the outset, pushed
our team methodologically and representation-
ally. In this paper, we seek to show something of
ways in which we have worked as a team to
understand building events and, in so doing,
reveal something of our methodology. The
High-rise Project drew upon a series of loosely
related approaches for capturing and represent-
ing high-rise building events. Our tools blended
a wide palette of qualitative social scientific
methods, largely ethnographic and visual. Our
techniques of data capture included the exten-
sive use of video recording, go-alongs, inter-
views, photography, and documentary/archival
research. Our media of dissemination have
included journal papers, a web site (http://www.
ace.ed.ac.uk/highrise/) as well as the design and
production of a travelling memory box for use by
the Open Museum section of Glasgow Museum
(http://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/museums/
projects/red-road-flats/Pages/home.aspx).
In what follows, we offer some insights into
and reflections upon the methodology of our
building work. The project in itself was not
methodologically consistent, in that we adopted
different methods and theoretical stances with
respect to different aspects of the project. An
example of this is the way in which some of
the study is informed far more evidently by eth-
nomethodology (a perspective for understanding
everyday methods), but other parts grounded
more in a Latourean-inspired sociology, while
other parts in conversation with visual and instal-
lation art practices. We let this diversity flourish
inside the project and reflected upon it as we
© 2011 The Authors

J.M. Jacobs et al.: Methods at the Interface of Geography and Architecture
went, knowing that each approach would yield
different types of data that would do different,
and not always immediately compatible kinds of
work.
Flattening the high-rise
The spirit of our methodology has been an exer-
cise in avoiding the ‘vertiginous swing’ (Latour,
2005, 169) between a number of polarities:
macro and micro; actor and structure; and tech-
nology and society. Following Latour, we have
assumed that a strategic and temporary concep-
tual ‘flattening’ of our field of investigation
would allow us to better access the building in
action or as socio-technical event. For example,
our ethnography of high-rise buildings has
entailed bringing into our analysis the agency of
materials: the potentialities that lie in steel’s
strength, concrete’s insulating capacities, glass’s
magical quality of transparency, but also the fate
that is heralded by how steel rusts, concrete
spalls, asbestos poisons, or windows need clean-
ing (Reckwitz, 2002; see also Gregson et al.,
2010; Rose et al., 2010). It has also entailed
understanding that in studying housing architec-
ture, there are many more views than those of the
resident, even though in the study of the novel
high-rise form post-occupancy resident surveys
have had a long life. Our approach assumed that
what is said by people about the building – be it
in media reports, political meetings, interviews,
or informal asides – is only part of what they do
with the building. We also brought to the project
a range of approaches shaped by the recent prac-
tice turn in the social sciences (Schatzki, 2001).
As one of the team has recently noted in a
co-authored piece with Peter Merriman (Jacobs
and Merriman, 2011), to speak of ‘practising
architectures’ is, in the first instance, to embed
architecture in practice. We might think immedi-
ately of two very potent kinds of architectural
practitioners: the designer/architect and the
occupant/user. However, there are many other
architectural practitioners – builders, demolish-
ers, conservators, maintenance workers, do-it-
yourself (DIY)-ers, homemakers, cleaners,
artists, and vandals. We might also think of other
non-human architectural practitioners – pets,
rodents, birds, insects, plants, and moulds – who
also inhabit and act with buildings in all manner
of ways. There are also many other forces and
actions involved in architecture – supporting,
sealing, joining, weathering, peeling, and rusting
– all of which work to hold it in place or com-
promise its very presence.
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129
In our project, visualisation was used as a
speculative and conceptual tool in the mode that
contemporary architects, or cartographers, or
future thinking modellers might. We thought in
and through the visual. We did not simply subject
pre-existing or self-produced visuals to analysis
(be it an analysis of content or production or
reception) although, as we will show, we did do
that too. We also created images of how we
wanted to think and in order to produce thoughts
in others. For example, in our early questioning of
‘why high-rises?’, and then ‘why high-rises fail
in one place and succeed in another?’ we were
constantly under pressure to narrow down to two
widely accepted explanations. ‘Why high-rises?’
is often addressed as an expression of an out-of-
control architectural ego (see Hayden, 1984).
‘Why high-rises fail in one place and succeed in
another?’ is often accounted for through recourse
to national housing policy frameworks, as if they
explain everything we need to know about
housing outcomes (see Dunleavy, 1981). We
wanted to make a case – to ourselves and others –
for expanding out our analysis to the swarm of
other possibilities that get subsumed by these
compelling but often narrowing causal explana-
tions. Visualising another possible order of things
was central to this effort. For example, relatively
early in the analysis stage of the study Stephen
Cairns, working with architects/designers Emma
Bush and Nigel Peake, produced a diagram that
interpreted the field of the high-rise as flattened;
wherein the personnel of the local housing
authority were represented as being on the same
plane as a concierge worker, a resident and a
vacated and decaying Red Road flat (Figure 3).
Following Latour’s (2005) advice about meth-
odological ‘flattening’ as a technique for reas-
sembling the social, we wanted to imagine the
possibility that each component in the assem-
blage called high-rise housing had the potential
to act with effect. For example, even though we
knew that residents were often subjected by
the Housing Authority, we also knew that the
Housing Authority was in turn subjected by the
vitality of the decaying and asbestos-ridden high-
rise it had to manage to 21st century standards.
Our flattened schematic diagram was not a true
rendition of the state of affairs of the Red Road
high-rise assemblage, but a rendition of our stra-
tegic, conceptual reordering of it and its compo-
nent parts. This visualisation did not operate for
us as an illustration of how the world is, it oper-
ated as speculative heuristic device to help us
reorder our own (and other’s) imaginaries.

130
Figure 3 Flattening the Red Road high-rise failure.
Source: The High-rise Project Team with Emma Bush and
Nigel Peake.
Flattening heuristically does not mean flatten-
ing analytically (see Hinchliffe, 1996; 1999).
Our high-rise building event is flat insofar as it
opened itself to different agencies, but it is not
ignorant of differentiation and how that might
reorder (limit and empower) the potentialities of
those agencies. Heuristic diagrams such as our
flattened high-rise assemblage helped us to
loosen the hold of very powerful, already exist-
ing explanatory narratives with respect to high-
rises and housing. They assisted us in inquiring
into the messier and more variable entangle-
ments of people, systems, rules, technologies,
and materials that do the everyday work of
keeping high-rises together (making high-rise
‘successes’) or pulling them apart (making high-
rise ‘failures’).
Show Us Your Home
‘Show Us Your Home’ was a method we adopted
for gathering information about people in, and in
action with, their high-rise flats. It worked as a
data gathering method in conjunction with stan-
dard format interviews, which covered topics
such as the resident’s housing history, what they
remembered of their first day in the building, and
their current views on their housing and its man-
agement. As our working name for the method
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Geographical Research • May 2012 • 50(2):126–140
indicates, Show Us Your Home entailed inviting
our research participants to take us on a tour of
their home and show it to us. This resident-
guided tour was video recorded. This task was
flagged in all information sheets distributed prior
to participant consent and was an optional part
of participating in the research. For example, a
respondent might agree to be interviewed in their
home (or out of it) but not participate in the Show
Us Their Home task. Participants were also free
to determine the home tour itinerary: they could
show us every nook and cranny or leave bits of
the house off the tour. The Show Us Your Home
task was timed to follow on from the interview,
building on trust developed in the course of that
encounter. As such, it also created moments
when topics discussed in the interview were
elaborated through demonstration.
The method of Show Us Your Home was
adopted as a way of challenging the relatively
static, and materially pacifying, framework of
the interview or survey. Interviews and surveys
have been central to the methodology of post-
occupancy housing research. That research has
often been conducted in unison with state provi-
sion of housing and has operated to evaluate
occupant satisfaction with the housing provided.
It has also been used by a range of non-state
agencies and agents seeking to speak back to
state-based providers on behalf of housing
clients. It provides valuable data but data of a
very specific kind. In the first instance, and
perhaps unsurprisingly, it positions the resident
as the primary and privileged human in the
picture of a housing event. It assumes that under-
standing resident satisfaction with housing is the
primary goal of research. It also assumes that the
formed opinions, as expressed by residents, are
the routes to this understanding. And finally, it
assumes that the resident must speak for the
building technology that is doing the housing, be
that in its favour or not. In this sense, it pacifies,
or at the very least, always mediates the materi-
ality and logics of the housing technology by
way of the user (in this case the resident). Now,
there is nothing wrong with this mode of data
collection. It is entirely suited to evaluative
models of housing scholarship. Furthermore,
when one’s political or moral responsibility is to
provide a client with appropriate housing, then
this is exactly the kind of research and data
needed. Housing reform activities of various
kinds – be they led by external advocates, resi-
dent activism, or an internally driven self-
improving bureaucracy – have routinely turned to
© 2011 The Authors

J.M. Jacobs et al.: Methods at the Interface of Geography and Architecture
such techniques and data. Understanding resi-
dent’s satisfaction levels with their housing was
not the goal of our research. We respected resi-
dent attitudes (and sought them out through inter-
views) but saw these expressed opinions as one
of many practical doings between resident and
house. We knew that satisfactions and dissatis-
factions flourished among residents with respect
to the high-rises in which they lived. And we
were very interested in how such registers of
contentment worked for or against the fortunes of
the high-rise. However, we saw such views as
one component in a high-rise housing building
event. Our goal was to keep our focus on socio-
technical associations and doings that comprised
the everyday eventfulness of a building and its
resident co-designing high-rise living (Dant,
2005; 2007).
In developing the Show Us Your Home tech-
nique, we were able to draw upon a rich pre-
existing methodology within the related fields of
home studies and studies of home-based tech-
nologies. This tradition of research has sought to
attend to how home objects, technologies, and
spaces are narrated and lived with (Cieraad,
1999). Influential with respect to video-based
studies of the home included the relatively early
‘cultural inventories’ of Collier and Collier
(1986), studies of technology use and domestic
routines (Tolmie et al., 2002; Crabtree and
Rodden, 2004; Relieu and Olszewska, 2004;
Nomura et al., 2005; Taylor and Swan, 2005);
the home video-ethnographies developed by
Pink (2007); and the ‘ethnoarchaeological’
approach of scholars in the UCLA Centre for
Everyday Lives of Families (Arnold and
Graesch, 2002; Ochs et al., 2004; 2006). At least
some of this research on home practices uses
intensive, continual, or sequential observation,
either through researcher witnessing or video
recording, or resident-managed diaries or self-
recordings (see Oberhauser, 1997 on the home
as a field site; and on ITC-focused home eth-
nographies, see Venkatesh, 1985; Haddon, 1992;
Mateas et al., 1996; O’Brien et al., 1999;
Frohlich and Kraut, 2003; Relieu et al., 2007;
Tutt, 2008; Church et al., 2010; Gram-Hansen,
2010). The Show Us Your Home method shares
common ground with these home studies
approaches. Although, unlike many of these
studies, it did not wish to use a fly-on-the-wall
technique of in situ observation. Such intense
observation was not entirely beyond the resource
limits of the project in terms of labour, time, and
equipment (and was used in another part of the
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131
study). However, in the context of the private
home, we did not feel it appropriate to engage in
long duration, potentially invasive observation of
residents going about their ordinary business. As
a method, Show Us Your Home also draws upon
non-home-based mobile or ‘go along’ methods
used in street, neighbourhood, or non-urban
outdoor settings (see Fuller et al., 2008; Pinder,
2005; Phillips, 2005; Ross et al., 2011). As
Crouch (2003, 1945) notes, go-alongs offer a
means by which to access the eventful unfolding
of mundane socio-technical ‘tangles’. By asking
residents to Show Us Your Home, we hoped to
activate the socio-material eventfulness of high-
rise architecture. The method did not, however,
indulge some fantasy of naturalism. We did not,
for example, assume that Show Us Your Home
would act as a mechanism for accessing some-
thing more ‘real’ or ‘more accurate’ than spoken
words, although it is of course true that some-
times what residents say and what they do are not
one in the same.
Our framing of the home tour request through
the term ‘show’ was subject to considerable pre-
fieldwork reflection. What would the structure of
‘showing’ activate and what would it preclude?
In the first instance, we knew that the act of
showing belonged more to a narrated visual
scenic than it did some notion of ‘natural’ every-
day action. The ‘show me’ directive activated
objects/things in a ‘home viewing’ structure, as
opposed to a structure of observed everyday
doing. The Show Us Your Home request also
inserted a certain reflexive distance between the
respondent showing, the thing/room being
shown, and the interviewer/camera seeing. The
Show Us Your Home event framed the house/
room as a scene and as something that is pointed
at or gestured towards. As part of the Show Us
Your Home tour, we often asked residents to
interact with their home and its objects. For
example, we might ask: ‘show me (and talk me
through) how you do your washing’; ‘show
me what you do with your rubbish’; and ‘show
me your view’. This request enable us to experi-
ence something approximating what residents
might do (and not do) with their flats, something
approximating what they might say (and not say)
about their flats in everyday action. However,
whatever we witnessed was also always a dem-
onstration at our request. These demonstration
moments enabled us to capture something of
the socio-technical interaction in the home and
equally, the interaction between acting and nar-
rating the home to the camera. Show Us Your

132
Home created a distinctive (and only indicative)
kind of high-rise event in which we, as research-
ers, and the camera, as recording instrument,
were constituting parts. That is why we never
worried if the interviewer was in the field of
action, or if the resident, as they often did, called
the camera in to take a closer look. We were
happy for ourselves and our equipment to be
captured in the building event being video-ed, for
we were all co-producers of it.
As a data gathering technique, Show Us Your
Home operated as an effective way of soliciting
information on the co-produced, associative
world of residents, high-rise architecture, and
objects. Our home tour guides invariably,
although to quite different degrees, supple-
mented their showing with commentary
(Figure 4). For example, opening a window as
part of a ‘show me your view’ directive generated
a range of verbalised comments. The type of
comments were quite different to what might, or
might not, be said in the course of routine, every-
day action. They were also quite different to the
kind of commentary that might be solicited from
the interview, where there is spatial and temporal
distance between the speaking informant and the
object or practice being referred to. Show Us
Your Home commentaries varied. For example,
approaching or opening a window as part of a
Show Us Your Home tour might solicit commen-
tary on the window technology itself, or on the
state of maintenance of the technology (cleaning
and repair), on how it has been embellished
by being lived with (decoration and damage).
Equally, resident commentary might bypass the
window altogether and refer to the view, as it was
before us on that day or, through the filter of
memory, how it presented on a previous occasion
(see Jacobs et al., 2008; 2011).
For some, showing their home to a visitor is
natural and automatic. For others it is not. We
Figure 4 Example of a ‘show us your view’ sequence, showing how action comes along with words.
Source: The High-rise Project Team.
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Geographical Research • May 2012 • 50(2):126–140
were always aware that our request to residents to
Show Us Your Home might be received ambiv-
alently. We were, after all, strangers/researchers.
Furthermore, in the case of Red Road in
Glasgow, the high-rise was in a very dilapidated
state, and no amount of human love and DIY
effort could hide this fact. Also, homes often
have a tidy front stage and very untidy back
stage. We did not assume that the Show Us Your
Home request would activate tours and commen-
taries that were shaped by someone feeling
‘house proud’, to coin a cliché term. Many of the
Show Us Your Home tours solicited excuses,
apologies, and commentaries of the limits and
short fallings of the house.
As we have noted earlier, what was shown in
Show Us Your Home was directed by the resi-
dent, they could show us as much or as little of
their flat as they wanted. Show Us Your Home
gave us access to a wide sample of stories,
scenes, and actions. What we, as researchers, saw
and understood from these video-recorded events
was subject to the filters of our theory and the
close scrutiny of repeated viewings that revealed
so much of what could not be put into words of
how residents and building co-produce the high-
rise building event. We do not have the space to
discuss those findings in detail here, but we have
to date, for example, explored the co-production
of high-rise views (Jacobs et al., 2008; 2011).
That analytical work not only contributed to the
materialising of visual studies but also to ongo-
ing demonstrations of the distributed agencies of
architectural assemblages (a matter we return to
in our conclusion).
Concierge workplace study
By talking of the high-rise as a building event,
we sought to understand it as a socio-material
accomplishment: something that was the out-
come of an ongoing process of holding together
© 2011 The Authors

J.M. Jacobs et al.: Methods at the Interface of Geography and Architecture
and, inevitably or even coincidentally, not
holding together. Seen in this way, the stable
architectural object (architecture-as-noun) is the
effect of various doings (architecture-as-verb).
One of the key aspects of human ‘doing’ in an
around architecture is maintenance. As the high-
rises we were interested in were delivered as
collective consumption services, they were sup-
ported by state-sponsored maintenance systems
(see Jacobs and Cairns, 2011; Strebel, 2011). We
tracked maintenance workers in both the Sin-
gapore and Glasgow high-rises we studied. We
were especially interested in, and were able to
more fully resource, the study of maintenance
work at the soon-to-be-demolished, and nearby,
high-rise of Red Road Glasgow. The team con-
ducted an intensive workplace ethnography of
the concierge service. The study followed the
everyday activities of the 11 concierges working
in the concierge station that was situated in the
entrance hall of one of the Red Road blocks, 213
Petershill Drive. The concierge station ran 24
hours a day and 7 days a week. The 24 hour cycle
was broken into two 12 hour shifts, worked by
three concierge per shift. The services offered
by the concierge included ‘manning’ a 24-hour
CCTV surveillance station, monitoring security
locked and remote controlled main entrance
doors, offering a cleaning service for elderly
people, cleaning and maintaining communal
spaces (entrance halls and stairs), and dealing
with waste disposal. The Red Road concierge
service had the challenging task of acting as
front-line maintenance and security personnel in
a building that was earmarked for demolition. So
designated, many larger repairs were on hold,
many flats were empty or emptying (as tenants
were relocated and flats not reoccupied), and
many systems were being shut down. Still, the
concierge had to continue to maintain and secure
the building.
The workplace ethnography of the Red Road
concierge drew from other ethnomethodologi-
cally inspired workplace studies (Heath and Luff,
2000; Luff et al., 2000). By definition, eth-
nomethodology is not a methodology but an
analytical perspective used to study the (ethno-)
methods that participants use to order or design
the world they inhabit (Garfinkel, 1967). The
team’s approach sought to empirically grasp
building maintenance as configured and locally
produced in ‘naturally’ accountable work prac-
tices (Sacks, 1984; Silverman, 2007). The terms
‘naturally occurring’ and ‘naturally accountable’
are taken from the language of ethnomethodol-
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133
ogy and conversation analysis (CA) where it
refers, as Mondada notes (2006), to the distinc-
tion between spontaneous, naturally occurring
events that carry ordinary life practices as
opposed to ‘artificial’ events such as those staged
in the setting of the social science laboratory or
created in the context of an interview (or even a
Show Us Your Home request). For example, we
videoed a 24-hour sequence of the concierge
workstation in operation, showing all the con-
cierge comings and goings (and idlings), their
interactions with various CCTV, phone, entrance,
and key technologies as well as with residents,
visitors, and other workers who were passing by.
What we were trying to see by attending care-
fully to the concierges at work was the locally
achieved organisation of interaction between
them, the building, its humans, and its other
active elements.
The concierge study was set up as a video-
ethnography for we wanted to move away from
questioning and listening (accounts of what is
felt and said to be done) and towards detailed
observation and recording of how high-rise
building work tasks were accomplished. There is
debate around the use of video recording in eth-
nographical research, which we have already
touched upon in the previous section but can
usefully elaborate further at this point. On the
one hand, there are those who argue that video-
recorded data are ‘neutral’ and natural, with the
camera merely recording what is before it. On
the other hand, there are those who argue that a
video camera inevitably has a distorting effect on
the recorded event, compelling videoed subjects
to adjust their behaviour. Another way of think-
ing about the video camera in research is to adopt
a praxiological understanding of data production
(Lomax and Casey, 1998; Macbeth, 1999;
Laurier and Philo, 2006; Mondada, 2006). Our
study of the concierge’s building work (as with
our Show Us Your Home tours) was undertaken
with the camera and not simply through it
(Büscher, 2005). At various times, the camera
and its operator are quite active in the events
analysed, walking along with the concierge,
being invited to be closer to the action, being
directed to look away, and soliciting demon-
strations and explanations. In short, videoing
workers at work in the building involved them
extensively and permanently accounting for the
presence and the action of the researcher and his
or her camera. In adopting this approach to
videoing, the Project Team drew on the thinking
of Mondada (2006, 11), who argues that ‘video

134
shooting actively co-produces the orderliness of
the events, gestures, actions, and talk it displays
and documents’. She proposes considering video
shooting as ‘an embodied exercise of inquiry and
analysis’ (Mondada, 2006, 51) or as Douglas
MacBeth (1999, 152 also quoted in Mondada,
2006, 51) put it, the ‘work of assembling visible
social fields’.
The high-rise maintenance worker video data
were subject to analysis by way of data sessions
involving group analysis of interview transcripts,
ethnographic notes, and video data. The method
of analysis was inductive and drew inspiration
from the detailed analytical mode of CA. CA
attends to the verbal and non-verbal making of
conversational interactions: words, gestures, and
scenes. The video analysis process depends upon
repeated viewings and close sequential readings
of short segments representing specific instances
of naturally occurring events. It depends on such
close viewings because, as Knoblauch et al.
(2008, no page) note, certain forms of organisa-
tion (in our case socio-building organisations)
‘are not easily noticeable through careful obser-
vation but only transcribable through repeated
viewing of video-recorded events’. Recent schol-
arship outside the field of CA has started to take
its methods and apply them to interactive and
relational practices that are not simply about
‘conversation’ in a narrow sense but about a wide
range of ‘situated activities in their ordinary set-
tings’ (Knoblauch et al., 2008, no page; see also
Heath, 1984; Goodwin, 1994; 1995; Hindmarsh
and Heath, 1998; Lomax and Casey, 1998;
Mondada, 2006; Laurier et al., 2008). In apply-
ing such methods to architecture, the High-rise
Project further extended its applications, in this
instance to building/worker interactions. It did so
without fixing the building into something that
might be called context or mere scene. To be
sure, we were able to make sense of how the
concierges interactionally situated, produced,
recognised, and coordinated their maintenance
activities in the high-rise work setting. However,
through such close scrutiny of concierge work,
we could show the ways in which the building
and the workers together accomplished high-rise
maintenance and security. As Strebel (2011)
argues, buildings do not simply ‘respond’ to
human occupation but, with humans, they
co-constitute a ‘living building’ (and see Brand
1995).
As part of this thread of our research, we have
paid specific attention to a maintenance work
routine called the ‘block check’. The block check
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Geographical Research • May 2012 • 50(2):126–140
is where building workers (be they concierge or
housing officers) survey the building via a routi-
nised pathway and visually scan the building as
they move through it. Usually in a high-rise, a
block check entails the responsible worker catch-
ing a lift to the top floor of the building then
walking down, following a systematic pathway
while looking for damage, rubbish, and anything
else out of order or out of place (Figure 5).
Again, space precludes us reporting in detail
on our findings from this work, the analysis of
which is ongoing. Our early analysis of this
material (Strebel, 2011; see also Jacobs and
Cairns 2011) offers ample demonstration of the
ways in which building and worker together
co-produce the high-rise building event. Of
course, under certain conditions that co-
production inclines towards repair and order,
keeping the building in place and giving it
(through the stability bequeathed by maintenance
done well) momentum as a high-rise. At other
times, that co-production might well incline
towards the closure of systems of security and
maintenance such that the high-rise assemblage
is not stabilised and it enters the future in unrec-
ognizable ways, as demolition, building waste,
and memory.
Surface matter
Thus far, the techniques that we have discussed,
despite their interest in decentring the human
subject in the action of a building event, have
nonetheless followed the humans to the building
event. Another suite of techniques we used were
far more evidently interested in the materiality
of the building and its vitality. This perspective
took inspiration from a mix of art practice,
architectural representation, and archaeological
recording techniques. We gathered this suite of
techniques under the title of gleaning. Gleaning
is the practice of picking across an already har-
vested field. Reapers take what is valued in a
field; gleaners take value out of what is left
behind. Historically, gleaning was a valued eco-
nomic activity and gleaning often enjoyed legal
protection, a recognition of its redistributive, and
welfare function.
In conceptualizing this aspect of the study, we
were especially indebted to the filmic work of
Agnes Varda in The Gleaners and I (2000). This
documents, among other things, shows the
various modes of gleaning operating in modern-
day France. The film also establishes gleaning as
a metaphor for a wider course of modern-day
action that seeks to reclaim value from that
© 2011 The Authors

J.M. Jacobs et al.: Methods at the Interface of Geography and Architecture
Figure 5 Concierge at work at Red Road, Glasgow.
Source: The High-rise Project Team.
which is deemed valueless, redundant, or obso-
lete. The term gleaning spoke to the interests and
methods of the High-rise Project in a number of
ways. Firstly, gleaning implies a mode of acqui-
sition that happens bit by bit and from here and
there, and we felt that this image suited our bri-
colage approach to data collection. Secondly, and
very broadly, we conceived of our project as
picking over a housing type that was assumed, at
least by some in some contexts, to be no longer
(if ever) workable or viable: a housing type that
had lost value. Thirdly, our high-rises were each
borne of increasingly rare, state-sponsored,
welfare systems of universal housing provision
that serve the poor and the disenfranchised, just
as sanctioned gleaning once did. Finally, our
attention to a vital materialism meant we were
focused on an aspect of the world that, until
recently, modern social sciences had devalued
and felt behind.
Our high-rise gleaning had various compo-
nents to it, applied in both the high-rise case
studies of Glasgow and Singapore. We would
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135
like to feature just one aspect of that work, and
one that used the technique of photographic
montage. In both of our high-rise block case
studies we sought permission to photograph a
sample of living rooms in their entirety. The pho-
tographing of the rooms was done by way of
sequential, grid photography taking in all walls,
the floor, and the ceiling. These raw data were
then post-produced into a montaged, fold-out
image (Figure 6).
In creating these fold-out visualisations of
high-rise living rooms, we wished to communi-
cate something of the material vibrancy of an
interior: its surface effects. It is commonplace
to read vitality with respect to architecture in
humanist terms, the assumption being that it is
human users who give life to the inert building.
Certainly, the cluttered and artefact encrusted
living rooms we recorded in Bukit Ho Swee,
Singapore, readily fed such a culturalist reading
of vitality. However, this is not the only vitality
we were in search of. Buildings, like all fabrica-
tions, have a default trajectory – that of decay and

136
Figure 6 Room fold-out, Red Road, Glasgow.
Source: The High-rise Project Team, with Emma Bush and Nigel Peake.
deterioration (see Edensor, 2005; 2011). Once
assembled, buildings naturally and incrementally
turn towards a course of disassembling. Else-
where (Jacobs and Cairns, 2011) we have
referred to this tendency as the materiality of a
building defecting from its human-programmed
destiny as a building. This is why buildings need
maintenance work, which attempts to off set this
inevitable ending. Interior decoration, which we
imagine mainly to be about expressed identity,
also plays its part in repressing and dressing over
this destiny. So we were in search not simply, or
only, of a human vitality with architecture as
context but architecture’s necessary (if some-
times repressed) vital materialism.
Designing architects often dedicate their ener-
gies to cultivating affects by making atmosphere
and producing what Thrift (2009, 123) calls
‘mood-catching environments’: shaped by the
size or positioning of windows, the proportions
of room, the number and form of doors and other
circulation apertures, the materials used, and the
acoustics. Residents and other users also subsi-
dise this designed-in atmosphere of architecture,
through their DIY efforts and their decorating (or
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Geographical Research • May 2012 • 50(2):126–140
lack there of). And, of course, those less knowing
but nonetheless purposeful agents such as mould,
damp, dust, rust, and fading also play their part in
the creation of architectural atmosphere. It is
important for geographers to be curious about
the cultivation of atmospheres in architecture
and the human subject’s experiences of them.
For example, recent work by geographers (Adey,
2008; Kraftl and Adey, 2008; Bissell, 2010) has
shown that mood design can be used to entirely
different political, social, and economic effects,
sometimes to cultivate well-being, other times to
‘turn a buck’, and then again for coercion or
persuasion. However, we were curious about less
purposeful atmospheric effects such as those pro-
duced by the clutter, or neglect, or abandonment
of the living building. We were trying to cultivate
what Zizek (2003) called a ‘feeling for the inert’.
The mode of the fold-out drew upon a specific
representational tradition that architectural histo-
rian Robin Evans (1997) referred to as the ‘devel-
oped surface drawing’. The format consists of a
set of orthographic projections that ‘fold out’ the
internal surfaces of a room so that they appear to
lie flat on the page. Such fold-out drawings of
© 2011 The Authors

J.M. Jacobs et al.: Methods at the Interface of Geography and Architecture
rooms emerged in the 18th century to serve the
newly developed ensemble aesthetic of interior
design. The fold-out drawing allowed viewers to
see the relationship between the decorated walls
of a room and the furniture that populated it. The
technique enabled coherent decorative schemes
to be developed and represented to prospective
clients. So these original architectural fold-outs
were designed to capture and communicate
something of the human-produced atmosphere
and look of a room. Our elaboration of the fold-
out took this 18th century mode for communicat-
ing atmosphere and mixed it up with a photo-
montage technique that the artist Alain Paiement
had developed and applied to occupied and aban-
doned rooms (see as an indicative work Constel-
lation (squat) 1996, and Local Rock 2004). Both
these methods offer another perspective with
respect to the current, seemingly commonsense,
suspicion of the a-subjective (seemingly objec-
tive) bird’s eye view. We hope that our self-
reflexive reappropriation of the view from
nowhere might create a compellingly and sug-
gestive visualisation of the ‘impersonal affects’
of high-rise interiors (Bennett, 2010; xiii).
In Bukit Ho Swee Singapore, our fold-outs
were of rooms that were still fully occupied. In
that context, they recorded and expressed the
ongoing vitality and clutter of life in these mod-
estly sized, but fully used, early generation high-
rises – the familiar humanist vitality mentioned
previously. In Red Road, we were given permis-
sion to enter into flats that had been recently
vacated (see Figure 6). We were not the first
scholars to try and make something of a recently
vacated room. Buchli and Lucas (2001) had
earlier created a photographic-text essay of a
recently abandoned council flat. Their photo
essay imposed a narrative frame over the detritus
left behind in the vacated flat. Its photographic
framing was as if from a just-arrived-on-the-
scene onlooker and was supplemented by a nar-
rativised account of the likely recent (human)
history that led up to the scene before them. Our
attempt to capture the atmosphere of the vacated
Red Road flats was less interested in the preced-
ing human narratives that might account for
abandonment, and more interested in the material
unfolding that was evident in, and would con-
tinue on from, the moment of human vacating. In
the case of Red Road, the photo-montage fold-
outs communicate a materialised atmosphere that
is the consequence of years of disinvestment
(economic, political, cultural, and emotional)
and are potent emblems of a process of unbuild-
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137
ing. The specific logics of the relations of
unbuilding Red Road we have yet to render as
explicitly as we might like, as Kraftl (2010) has
noted. That said, we offered an early attempt at
this in our paper on the government announce-
ment of the demolition of Red Road and subse-
quent failure of housing activists interested in
saving it from that fate. As we noted, activists
could not rally residents of Red Road to resist
demolition and to align with their wish to hold on
to the utopian vision of universal housing provi-
sion that had sought to realise itself in the high-
rise typology (Jacobs et al., 2007).
Conclusion
In terms of the collection and presentation of
findings, contemporary geographers are largely
invested in words that are occasionally subsi-
dised by visuals which operate illustratively. This
logic holds even for some of the more self-
confessed visual geographies. In the High-rise
Project, visualisation was a mode of heuristic
conceptualisation, data collection, data presenta-
tion, and data retention. Visualisation shaped
how we thought of our research object, how we
captured that object, how we represented it in
academic and other fora, and how we archived
our material. We have had to engage in ongoing
reflection on the nature of visual data capture and
the methodological fantasies that often accom-
pany it. In doing this, we turned to a range of
social scientist using visual methodologies as
well as taking inspiration from visual artists and
architects who more routinely work through
visual idioms. In working closely with visual
methods, we have not assumed that the visual
accounts for everything or that everything that
matters is visual. Visual methods of data gather-
ing are but one component of a suite of methods
we used, and we used them not simply to grasp
visualisation as it happens in a building event but
a range of socio-technical practices, values,
affects, and orders.
In both our case studies, we knowingly (but
not without self-reflection) operated with some-
thing of a salvage paradigm (Clifford, 1989),
even though this did not always chime with the
mood surrounding the high-rises we researched.
In the case of Bukit Ho Swee Singapore, these
relatively modest early generation flats were still
being upgraded and invested in. They were still
vibrant and viable homes, although the plans for
40-storey blocks across the road were a reminder
that this older style high-rise was becoming
increasingly anachronistic in local housing

138
visions. In the case of Red Road, the building
was quite literally coming down. The local
housing authority simply wanted to move on and
demolish, readying the site for another housing
vision. If they were interested in salvaging any-
thing from Red Road, it was the land and the
saleable demolition waste. Residents variously
could not wait to be relocated, did not care, or felt
an ambivalent nostalgia towards flats they loved
but knew were no longer in good enough condi-
tion for modern living. Housing activists were
actively trying to rally residents into resisting
demolition and off-set the end entirely. A few
community artists were working at Red Road,
although not necessarily in a way that focused on
the pending end. More recently in the case of Red
Road, there has been growing public awareness
of the bitter-sweet significance of this once am-
bitious high-rise housing solution coming to
an end. The local state, through a partnership
between Glasgow Life and Glasgow Museum
and Glasgow Housing Association, has estab-
lished the Red Road Flats Legacy Project (see
http://www.redroadflats.org.uk/ and http://www.
glasgowlife.org.uk/museums/projects/red-road-
flats/Pages/home.aspx). This work is designed
to offer the community the opportunity to
commemorate and mark the end of Red Road. In
this context of active, state-endorsed, memory
work, our visual ethnography of the Red Road
estate is now a community resource. What were
‘data’ to us is now being revalued as ‘social
history assets’. As we write this paper, we are
embedding those ‘assets’ in a small-scale
travelling exhibition called ‘Red Road in a Box’.
This Red Road box does not offer an accurate
account of the history of Red Road but is a
travelling, handling box that evokes something of
the atmosphere and life of this under demolition
building.
A final statement on interdisciplinary collabo-
ration is needed. Much of our methodology –
visual renderings, speculative diagramming and
designing of exhibits – has only been possible
because of the fact that this is an interdiscipli-
nary project bridging across geography and
architecture, and we have been able to draw in
and properly brief design-based research assis-
tants at various points. Most current geographies
of architecture do not work collaboratively with
architects; they more routinely have the architect
and his or her practices or outputs as research
subjects or objects. Geographers do work col-
laboratively with artists, and these creative
geography efforts provide alternative templates
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Geographical Research • May 2012 • 50(2):126–140
for geographers to also work collaboratively
with architects on academic research agendas.
There are expressive and representational possi-
bilities that exist within the visual languages of
architecture that are of immense benefit to the
conceptualisation and communication of geo-
graphical ideas. We hope our project offers some
useful examples of this and offers suggestions
and points of debate for future scholarship
on building events and other living and dying
architectures.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The research upon which the paper reports was supported by
the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK.
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