AHRA Booklet

The 17th AHRA PhD Student Symposium took place virtually in 2020, hosted by the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape.

The papers that were submitted and discussed at the symposium have now been published and can be accessed online. With thanks to James Craig, Alex Blanchard, Sonali Dhanpal, Kieran Connolly and Ashley Mason for their great work on the symposium.

Abstract

The Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) 17th 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.