16th Annual AHRA PhD Student Symposium 2020, Newcastle University

The Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) 16th AHRA PhD Student Symposium 2020, to be hosted by the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University, takes as its departure point the tendency for architectural research to be dissected into distinct disciplinary categories, including ‘architectural history’, ‘architectural theory’ and ‘architectural design’. This categorisation implies that architectural research requires methods to be applied from outside of its discipline, rather than conceiving of architectural research as a discipline with its own research methods. How then might we consider our encounters with architectural research in a way that links to our own ways of working and conception of the wider world?

Encountering architectural research in this way means acknowledging that architecture is not only inherently interdisciplinary, but that it is also a field offering its own distinct practices and ways of relating to society and culture. It is such re-thinking that, as this symposium proposes, opens the possibility for architectural research to be situated as a core research discipline. This re-consideration of architectural research is part of an ongoing project conceived by the Architectural Research Collaborative (ARC) at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University.

Some suggested themes that may relate to research encounters via architecture’s methods:

  • Encounters between the interrelated scales of architectural research: from macro to micro; from infrastructures, assemblages, ecologies, buildings to construction details.
  • Encounters within iterative approaches to architectural research that may consider: conversations, specifications, experimentations, prototypes and risk-taking.
  • Encounters between architecture and its relations to social, economic, geographic, cultural, historical, conceptual and material forces and practices.
  • Encounters of projective thinking, that may include: creative practice research methods, processes of translation between drawings and buildings, the imagining of better worlds and speculative futures.