Trust yourself: A Doubting Thomas perspective on building research

As physical artefacts, buildings provide material evidence of the process that led to their realization and the effectiveness of the decisions made prior to it: construction details implicitly reflect the knowledge of production factors embedded in the work and the efficacy of the contractual methods employed to structure underlying socio-technical relations; building use patterns validate or reject choices made at program definition and development stages; building maintenance requirements give an indication of the depth of thinking that went into the operational life of the building, or help assess the administrative and labour structure that put it together. Using a major public performance arts complex recently developed in Spain as an example, the paper seeks to validate such statements whilst showing that the empirical analysis required to do it can indeed help evaluate construction work, even in those (many) extreme cases where political sensitivity is likely to stop the disclosure of technical documentation and thwart building analysts' ambitions to examine construction output. In connecting promoters' declared objectives and buildings’ physical results with knowledge of the industry and participating actors’ alleged roles, scholars can be very effective at producing development portraits of specific construction experiences that enable technical and public scrutiny. Understanding the effectiveness of determinate building processes vis-á-vis their end products may assist public agencies, institutional bodies and industry actors in taking full advantage of the intellectual capital generated by specific projects, setting better conditions for the progress of technical knowledge, the introduction of innovation, the economic growth of the industry and, ultimately, the construction of a better built environment.