The symposium is a joint venture between The Nordic Association of Architectural Research and the PhD School at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen. The focus of its discussions is on PhD research in architecture in Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden. The overall objective is to contribute to understanding the complex nature of architecture as an expanding field for research, as a subject for education in academia, and as a discipline for professionals.
The architectural profession has always brought many different disciplines together. It combines areas of knowledge, tradition, and practice. And architects have always collaborated with different individuals within other professions. However, the conditions for creating architecture have changed in recent years; and, confronted with the many complex challenges facing today’s globalized society, such as the green transition, the necessity of transdisciplinary collaboration seems to be growing.
Transdisciplinarity in this context means that many different sciences (anthropology, sociology, geology, etc.) can be relevant to architecture. It depends on the focus of the specific research.
This trans- or interdisciplinarity relates to the awareness that, on the one hand, we must involve different, relevant sciences—with acknowledgement of their scientific distinctiveness—in order to create more attentive and relevant architecture. On the other hand, when working on an architectural project, we need to develop an understanding of how to get the various scientific insights to interact with the architecture we create and situate.
In architecture, practitioners and researchers alike are met by an increasing demand for transdisciplinary collaborations. This challenges the educational institutions and their curricula, including the PhD schools, which offer courses in various research practices, methods, and theories, thus defining and shaping the specific research competency of their students.
With this symposium we aim to address how the PhD programmes for architectural research in the Nordic countries embrace the notion of transdisciplinarity, and how it shapes the production and outcome of PhD research in these countries. Do the PhD programmes have a transdisciplinary approach? Do they offer courses in different disciplinary practices, methods, and theories? In what way do such courses create a transdisciplinary research environment, and how does it inform the PhD students and their research? Are the PhD programmes capable of supporting relational capacity, and are they critically self-reflexive in terms of their own practices? We want to know more about what the potential strengths and weaknesses of transdisciplinary collaboration and approaches might be, as seen from an architectural research perspective. And we wish to shed light on how they are experienced by PhD students.
Further, the intention of the symposium is to identify, investigate, and discuss changes in PhD education and to reflect on contemporary trends in PhD research at the schools of architecture in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. For this reason, the symposium calls on PhD students to engage in critical reflection based on their PhD projects and research experience, and to discuss the discursive focus of their PhD school.
