Marketing through research: William Caudill and Caudill, Rowlett, Scott (CRS)
The partners of Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS), a post-Second World War architecture firm in Texas, USA, were especially innovative in their professional and business practices. One of their original contributions was the firm's marketing strategy, which was based on promoting not only design achievements but also the CRS ‘research attitude’ by publishing and distributing studies produced by members of the firm. This strategy, which built on a wide-spread American belief in the fundamental role of science and research in the nation's progress and development, was successful in the first two decades of the firm, but was dissolved in the 1970s with the firm's expansion and transformation into a profit-oriented enterprise. This paper describes the firm's research-based marketing strategy and argues that the success of the marketing strategy relied on the CRS partners' ability first, to integrate marketing into the firm's approach to architecture and design and into cultural norms of the time and secondly, to balance the expectations of both their potential clients and their professional peers. The CRS marketing strategy is an important case study for architects today as they respond creatively to similarly competing demands.
Mixed messages: assessing communication in architectural education and practice
iv List of Figures viii Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Statement of Problem 3 Situation Analysis 6 Procedure 7 Purpose of the Study 8 Hypotheses and Research Questions 9 Assumptions 10 Delimitations 11 Significance of the Study 11 Definition of Terms 13 Chapter 2: Literature Review 19 Literature Overview 19 Trends Shaping Communication in Architecture 20 Few Scholarly Journals to Promote Dialogue 21 Roles of Communication in Architectural Practice 22
Reading research critically: assessing the validity and reliability of research instrumentation--Part 2.
Accurate measurement of research variables is necessary so that research consumers can trust that it is the research intervention that affected the change in the outcome variable, not some extraneous error component. Reliability is the accuracy with which the research instruments measure the variable that they are designed to measure. A number of known threats to instrument reliability should be anticipated by the researcher and looked for the consumer. These threats are presented in this article.