TACK x Jaap Bakema Study Centre
Communities of Tacit Knowledge: Architecture and its Ways of Knowing, or simply TACK, aims to gain a better understanding of the tacit knowledge that architects use when designing buildings and cities. TACK is an Innovative Training Network as part of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions within the European Horizon 2020 Framework Programme. It is formed by ten European academic institutions, three leading cultural institutions for architecture, and nine leading architectural firms. These partners jointly offer an innovative PhD training programme in the field of tacit knowledge in architecture, resulting in ten parallel PhD projects.
TACK Talks is a series of online lectures and conversations between the researchers and institutions of the TACK network. These ongoing discussions explore how tacit knowledge is part of internal conversations and communication with others.
Design projects and exhibitions commonly emerge from collaborations between designers, makers, clients, curators and a variety of experts, including social scientists, commercial, economic or technical advisors, critics, historians and heritage consultants. This extended team is thus composed of individuals with various backgrounds, different professional assumptions and varying perspectives. Architecture operates at the intersection of knowledge domains (arts, humanities, social sciences, applied technology) and has the capacity to create new solutions and perspectives based on its inherently synergetic knowledge production. So, architectural designs, exhibitions and research are the result of complex and occasionally conflicting sets of requirements that can only be reconciled through processes of negotiation between different disciplines and different fields of knowledge. These negotiations imply forms of synergetic thinking, which often rely on implicit common understandings, or tacit knowledge.
Tacit knowledge may be embedded in the relations between people, and is specific to particular historical developments and traditions. Tacit knowledge often results from the personal experience of making and thinking and therefore connects intellectual and practical work. It produces knowledge that is embedded in a community. As tacit knowledge is an essential element of the heuristic methods of knowledge production in the field of design, it also has the potential to absorb and respond to change. Tacit knowledge offers designers highly relevant instruments for dealing with constantly fluctuating conditions and a set of complex and apparently contradictory requirements.
The Jaap Bakema Study Centre facilitates research by, and in collaboration with, other cultural and academic institutions. Read more about its network and partners.
