The Changing Higher Education Research Environment: New Opportunities for Architectural Research (original) (raw)

Leadership in Architectural Research: Between Academia and the Profession

Enquiry: A Journal for Architectural Research, 2009

Recent decades have witnessed a notable expansion of architectural research activities, with respect to both subject and methodology. This expansion can be mostly credited to an increase in government and private funding of primarily academic research initiatives. More recently, however, a noticeable increase in research activities within the architectural profession makes it possible to argue that it is the profession itself that is now taking leadership in the development of contemporary research agendas. This growing significance of architectural research, in both academia and the profession,is ultimately a response to the diverse challenges facing the profession; most notably, the issue of environmental sustainability, but also including the rapid pace of technological change, the increase ddiversity of users, and the growing complexity of architectural projects. Engaging research is an essential factor in facing these challenges as well as taking full advantage of the opportuni...

Architecture Schools and Their Relationship with Research: It’s Complicated

Dimensions, 2021

Editorial Summary In »Architecture Schools and Their Relationship with Research: It’s Complicated«, Jan Silberberger describes the problematic divide between practicing architects that teach design at architecture schools and scholars investigating the practices of designing from a theoretical or social scientific perspective. Identifying three recurrent misunderstandings between these two groups, he stresses the lack of awareness about genuine research approaches within the discipline of architecture. Emphasizing the interconnectivity of research and practice, Silberberger highlights the potential for further development of the discipline that thorough reflections on the methodologies applied in architectural design afford. [Katharina Voigt]

Rethinking Models of Architectural Research

Historically, an argument can be made that architectural research was produced internal to firms and manufacturers as proprietary objects or sets of data. The concept of disciplines and professions reinforced the separation of open-sourced knowledge and the application of that knowledge in a commercial context. However, design has rapidly changed from an object-solution profession and is now faced with finding solutions to complex problems within complex systems. The past practice model of client, architect, and final product seems an ill-fit in this new context. The question is how to integrate a critical research process into a professional capacity in which that architectural research needs an inherent and immediate value to be performed or pursued. The SYNCH Research Group [synchRG] was formed in response to this question. Although research consortiums, design initiatives and research centres exist within many schools of architecture, most operate as a department or extensions of a school of architecture. SynchRG operates in neither private practice nor as a division of the university. Organized as a diverse and fluid association of faculty, students, professionals, and consultants, the synchRG group is focused on a design methodology and philosophical structure rather than a client, site, building, typology, or object. The focus on idiosyncratic or aesthetic solutions to singular problems is set aside in order to provide a collaborative intellectual space for professional based explorations. The paper will examine synchRG’s response to current architectural research challenges and illustrate its unique structure as a possible model to be replicated. A dialogue will be initiated on a model for practice aligned with both academia and industry

Architectural research and its enemies

Architectural Research Quarterly, 2010

Like the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) that preceded it, the UK government's proposed Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a means of allocating funding in higher education to support research. As with any method for the competitive allocation of funds it creates winners and losers and inevitably generates a lot of emotion among those rewarded or penalised. More specifically, the ‘winners’ tend to approve of the method of allocation and the ‘losers’ denigrate it as biased against their activities and generally unfair. An extraordinary press campaign has been consistently waged against research assessment and its methods by those involved in architectural education, which I will track over a decade and a half. What follows will question whether this campaign demonstrates the sophistication and superior judgment of those who have gone into print, or conversely whether its mixture of misinformation and disinformation reveals not just disenchantment and prejudice, but a naive...

Searching for a new paradigm in architectural education

2009

This paper is a position paper that will provide an extensive literature review on design education and raise questions regarding the current goal and a possible direction for architectural education. The paper will examine several critical issues such as education vs. training, the increasing disconnection of architectural education from the “real world” of design practice, and the role of research and theory in academia and the practice of architecture. This paper will address the challenges inherent in defining clear goals and directions for the field, given the current state of the architectural profession and academia. It will further argue that research can drive the development of a common language for use in a dialogue between the academic and the practitioner, a dialogue that is mediated by educational institutions, and which can also help shape architectural education and the profession as a whole. We are currently in a networking boom where global, intricate, and complex ...

Rethinking models of architectural research: we don’t do objects

ARCC Journal, 6/2, 2009

Historically, an argument can be made that architectural research was produced internal to firms and manufacturers as proprietary objects or sets of data. The concept of disciplines and professions reinforced the separation of open-sourced knowledge and the application of that knowledge in a commercial context. However, design has rapidly changed from an object-solution profession and is now faced with finding solutions to complex problems within complex systems. The past practice model of client, architect, and final product seems an ill-fit in this new context. The question is how to integrate a critical research process into a professional capacity in which that architectural research needs an inherent and immediate value to be performed or pursued. The SYNCH Research Group [synchRG] was formed in response to this question. Although research consortiums, design initiatives and research centres exist within many schools of architecture, most operate as a department or extensions of a school of architecture. SynchRG operates in neither private practice nor as a division of the university. Organized as a diverse and fluid association of faculty, students, professionals, and consultants, the synchRG group is focused on a design methodology and philosophical structure rather than a client, site, building, typology, or object. The focus on idiosyncratic or aesthetic solutions to singular problems is set aside in order to provide a collaborative intellectual space for professional based explorations. The paper will examine synchRG’s response to current architectural research challenges and illustrate its unique structure as a possible model to be replicated. A dialogue will be initiated on a model for practice aligned with both academia and industry.