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Developments towards Field-specific Research in Architecture and

Design: On Doctoral Studies in Scandinavia since the 1970s

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Citation for the original published paper (version of record):

Dunin-Woyseth von Turow, H., Nilsson, F. (2018)
Developments towards Field-specific Research in Architecture and Design: On Doctoral Studies in
Scandinavia since the 1970s
The Production of Knowledge in Architecture by PhD Research in the Nordic Countries: 25-48

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DEVELOPMENTS TOWARDS FIELD-SPECIFIC
RESEARCH IN ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN:
ON DOCTORAL STUDIES IN SCANDINAVIA SINCE THE 1970s
Halina Dunin-Woyseth and Fredrik Nilsson

ABSTRACT
Architectural and design research, especially in the context of doctoral studies,
has been pursued in Scandinavia for over forty years. This article sketches how
the field of architecture and design has developed over several decades with
regard to its three constituent components: professional practice, teaching, and
research. The components of practice, teaching, and research acted first as sep-
arate, then even as opposite, but later on moved closer together in order to,
most recently, synergistically permeate each other.

In the decades prior to the mid-1970s, design scholarship relied mostly on

mature practitioners who reflected on their life’s work. Teachers were practi-
tioners. The period between the mid-1970s and 1990 brought about an uncrit-
ical dialogue with academia, while looking for theoretical and methodological
frameworks in established academic disciplines. A polarization between prac-
titioners and researchers emerged. In the 1990s and in the beginning of the
new century, a stronger intellectual self-confidence developed among design
scholars. Practice, teaching, and research came closer to each other.

Most recent years have shown an even stronger movement towards field-spe-
cific research. It coincides with a growing awareness of a continuum from cre-
ative practice to scientific research, of the potential of research by art and by
design, and of inter- and transdisciplinarity which recognize designerly ways
of thinking. A kind of “permeability” between various kinds of practices of
architecture and design has been observed.

KEYWORDS
Architectural research, design research, field-specific modes of research, per-
meability of creative practices, doctoral education

THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE IN ARCHITECTURE BY PHD RESEARCH IN THE NORDIC COUNTRIES 25

 INTRODUCTION
Architectural and design research, especially in the context of doctoral stud-
ies, has been pursued in Scandinavia for over forty years. On the occasion of
the symposium The Production of Knowledge in Architecture by PhD Re-
search in the Nordic Countries, organized by the Nordic Association of Ar-
chitectural Research (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, 19–20 May
2016), we prepared a presentation that provided the foundation for this arti-
cle. The main intention of this presentation was to sketch a diachronic review
of the main features of the development of doctoral knowledge in Scandi-
navia. We found it useful to illuminate that development through the con-
texts of professional practice and teaching, which have both changed over the
years, sometimes supporting each other synergistically and other times not.
We have built this article on a structuring framework of periodization. We
shall attempt to sketch a broad time frame stretching from the mid-1970s to
the present time. We are aware that all systems of periodization are more or
less arbitrary. Yet, the remarkable can only be comprehended and assessed
in light of the historically dominant paradigm.1 We trust that our periodiza-
tion will yield such a framework that will help us understand the features of
each of the periods of development in architectural practice, education, and
research, and also the interplay between them in order to illuminate what
kind of doctoral knowledge these periods brought about. We decided to use
diagrams that we hope will make the proposed periodization easier to un-
derstand. We have presented the reasoning behind the construction of the
diagrams elsewhere.2

As a point of departure for this article, we chose to take a quotation by the re-
nowned American architectural scholar Julia Williams Robinson. She main-
tains that architecture is “an emerging discipline that involves professional
practice, research, and teaching”. She proceeds,

The character and effects of its products – disciplinary knowledge, the

forms of disciplinary practices, architectural artifacts – are the responsi-
bility of those within the field. Academics, researchers, and professional
practitioners are thus jointly responsible to society and to each other.3

We have studied the development of such a scholarly culture, but also noted
the cohesion of different practices by individual practitioners.4 A variety of
evidence of this culture can be traced, and recently the evidence is becoming
more pronounced and gaining momentum. We have related this emerging

26 NORDISK ARKITEKTURFORSKNING – THE NORDIC ASSOCIATION OF ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH

development to precedents and prevalent international tendencies in prac-
tice and research, and we have also collated them with developments in the
Scandinavian countries.

We can see the increasing pace of progress in the field of architectural re-
search today and during the last decade by comparing the first edition of
the seminal book Architectural Research Methods by Linda Groat and David
Wang from 2002 with the extended second edition from 2013.5 In the ac-
knowledgements of the second edition, David Wang makes the reflection
that “In writing it, I was struck by just how much has progressed in this arena
even since the first issue of this book a decade ago”.6 Groat and Wang note
that both the nature and the role of architectural research, as conducted in
academia and in practice, have gradually shifted over the decade since the
first edition was published. They argue that, from their vantage point, the
recent evolution of research in academic and professional settings has led
to an increasing convergence among the audiences of their book.7 They also
underline that the developments in Europe for bridging design with research
need special attention, and that the European developments suggest that the
domains of design and research become more connected and complemen-
tary. As an example in their analysis they use a doctoral thesis by a Belgian
architect who did her doctoral education and thesis at Chalmers University
of Technology.8 Architectural and design research, according to the authors,
is in the midst of an exciting time of development, and there have been many
attempts in the last decade to bridge the gap between design and research as
these have been conventionally understood. Design and research are neither
polar opposites nor equivalent domains of activity, Groat and Wang argue;
instead, subtle nuances and complementarities exist between the two.9

In the important book Design Research in Architecture: An Overview, also

from 2013, Murray Fraser gives a working definition of architectural re-
search that bridges the gap between design and research:

As a working definition, architectural design research can be described as

the processes and outcomes of inquiries and investigations in which ar-
chitects use the creation of projects, or broader contributions towards de-
sign thinking, as the central constituent in a process which also involves
the more generalised research activities of thinking, writing, testing, ver-
ifying, debating, disseminating, performing, validating and so on.10

THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE IN ARCHITECTURE BY PHD RESEARCH IN THE NORDIC COUNTRIES 27

 Fraser also underlines that design research is able to blend into other more
established research methodologies in the arts, humanities, and sciences,
and that it is vital that the design element and these other research methods
operate together in an interactive manner, feeding into each other through-
out the entire process. When it comes to how this has developed until today,
Fraser states that advances in architectural design research can clearly be
grouped geographically in the UK and Australia and a few specific countries
in Europe, where he explicitly points out Norway, Sweden, Belgium, and the
Netherlands. “Those are certainly the locations where various academic con-
ferences have been held over the last decade or so to discuss design research
in architecture, frequently linked to the issue of design doctorates.”11

This indicates how important Scandinavian developments in architectural

research have been in an international perspective, and that a lot has hap-
pened during the last decade in particular. In keeping with the intention for
this article, let us now start with the first period in our periodization frame-
work and follow the developments in Scandinavia in particular up to the
present day.

UNTIL THE MID-1970s:

INTERNAL CULTURE OF PRACTICE AND TEACHING
Over the years there has been a long tradition of exchange and close bonds
between the practice of architecture and design, on the one hand, and edu-
cation in these fields on the other. At almost all schools of architecture and
design, professional practitioners have constituted a significant part of the
faculty. That modus operandi has been practiced throughout history and is
still prevalent today.12 In architectural pedagogy, critique is an important
teaching model – and also plays an important part in architectural practice
– in which learning takes place in an individualized process based on under-
standing between students and their teachers and critics,13 where the critics
and teachers often are practicing architects. The teaching of architecture has
a long history, but the development of research education at schools of ar-
chitecture spans only a few decades. As an example, the teaching of archi-
tecture at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, has a
160-year-old history starting in 1856, but it was only in the mid-1960s that
research education started to become structured, and the first doctoral thesis
in architecture at Chalmers was published in 1972.14 Thus, in many countries
in Scandinavia and Europe during the 1970s, academic, discipline-based re-
search was considered only slightly relevant to professional practice, and it

28 NORDISK ARKITEKTURFORSKNING – THE NORDIC ASSOCIATION OF ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH

Figure 1. The first phase in the development of doctoral scholarship in architecture and design in
Scandinavia (until the mid-1970s). In this and in the following diagrams, the lower part represents
the level of professional architectural practices, and the upper part the level of academia with the
“clouds” of its disciplines. The arrows show interactions and communications, which are sometimes
non-existent or weak and therefore marked with a cross.

therefore met with great scepticism from practitioners. Clearly, field-specific

research more closely tied to practice had yet to be developed.15

The few doctoral projects from the period prior to the mid-seventies were
based on the PhD candidates’ own professional practice or teaching. The rea-
son to engage in doctoral studies was most often to reflect on and come to
a conclusion about one’s own professional career. The supervisors of these
few PhD students usually had no scholarly background, having been recruit-
ed among highly renowned practitioners with no research experience.16 The
reasoning and the language of the doctoral theses reminded mostly of inter-
nal professional discussions, without attempts to engage in an academic di-
alogue with other disciplines in order to contextualize the new architectural
knowledge in a broader knowledge landscape.

BETWEEN THE MID-1970s AND 1990:

POLARIZATION OF PRACTICE AND THEORY
In the middle of the 1970s, national authorities exerted pressure on the
schools of architecture in the Nordic countries in order to develop a more
academic – i.e. research-based – conformation in their educational pro-
grammes. The schools remained reluctant to this challenge, as there was no
strong tradition of academic work in the field. Searching for models for insti-
tutionalizing research, many schools looked to various academic disciplines
with a more theoretical basis of knowledge, particularly to the social scienc-

THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE IN ARCHITECTURE BY PHD RESEARCH IN THE NORDIC COUNTRIES 29

 es and humanities. These models were often “imported” into architecture
programmes. The aim of architectural research was primarily to develop a
theoretical foundation rather than to identify what knowledge architects had
already developed and what kind of knowledge was needed.17

Architectural and urban design practice was, collated with established re-
search, mostly considered to be a sort of “applied science”. PhD students
with an architectural background were expected to essentially abandon their
professional backgrounds as designers and architects. In reading their doc-
toral theses, one finds hardly any attempts at defining the authors’ scholar-
ly awareness and epistemological stance. In consequence, architectural re-
search of this period was definitely in want of its own intellectual identity in
the dialogue between architecture and various other academic disciplines. At
the same time, there were few attempts to apply the newly acquired doctoral
knowledge in professional practice.

Architectural research was strongly affected by theories and methods from

other academic disciplines, and it adopted many of these, but slowly archi-
tectural scholars began debating the idea of developing a field-specific iden-
tity and epistemological foundation, one based more on the specific knowl-
edge modes of architecture. The Association of Architectural Research was
founded in 1987 in Sweden, and a few years later it had become a pan-Scan-
dinavian endeavour and began to publish the Nordic Journal of Architectural
Research (NJAR). For many years, the NJAR was the only peer-reviewed
journal for architectural research in the Nordic countries, and as such it
played a substantial role in these developments.

Figure 2. The second phase in the development of doctoral scholarship in architecture and design in
Scandinavia (mid-1970s until 1990).

30 NORDISK ARKITEKTURFORSKNING – THE NORDIC ASSOCIATION OF ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH

Until the 1970s, teaching in practice-based fields such as architecture, de-
sign, and others had been almost entirely based on a master-apprentice
model. Renowned practitioners taught at the vocational schools. Research
was a peripheral phenomenon with regard to both practice and academia.
Salama and Wilkinson compared this dominance of practice in architecture
to a kind of “monadic” position.18 But since the mid-1970s, mostly because
of external, ministerial policies, research began to be established in schools
of architecture and design. Teaching began to appear as a new “specialized
practice”. One could observe a certain polarization among the faculty be-
tween those who still pursued the apprentice-master mode of teaching and
those who attempted to expand the curriculum to include an introduction
to knowledge derived from research. This research was not always regard-
ed as relevant by practitioners, nor sufficiently sophisticated academically
by academics.19 By the 1990s, one could perceive the development of two
different profiles among teachers of architecture: the practice-based and the
research-based.

THE 1990s: CLOSER DIALOGUE BETWEEN PRACTITIONERS

AND RESEARCHERS
This new period in the development was strongly influenced by how doc-
toral curricula were defined for PhD students, with their background first
in architecture and later from other creative practices. The task was to justi-
fy such curricula as “academic enough”, primarily in terms of the academia
from which the established, discipline-founded bodies of decision makers
were drawn. There were attempts to formulate frameworks for what prac-
tice-based issues were reasonable and justifiable. At several Scandinavian
schools of architecture, a concept of the “making disciplines” was developed.
This concept was an attempt to define both the academic standards of re-
search educed from creative practices and the practical relevance of the out-
put of this research.20

During the 1990s, the debates on post-modernism and post-structuralism

were cogent for the development of architectural practice and theory. The
critique of modernism included ideas from many other fields, and the the-
oretical discussions showed influences from such disciplines as sociology,
psychology, history, and especially philosophy, which can be observed in the
writings of some prominent scholars of that time.21

THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE IN ARCHITECTURE BY PHD RESEARCH IN THE NORDIC COUNTRIES 31

 Several prominent architectural firms began to develop research strategies.
Of these firms the most renowned is Rem Koolhaas and OMA, who present-
ed systematic approaches and research that was closely related to architec-
tural design and educational practice. During this period, books began to
be published by architects and offices presenting their work as research on
working methods towards systematic investigations of contemporary socie-
ties and urban situations.22

Towards the end of the 1990s, architectural scholars became increasingly

critical of adopting theoretical frameworks and methodologies from aca-
demia, first from the social sciences and later the humanities. The critics also
decried the unreflected use of theories and methods from other disciplines
without considering their relevance and appropriateness with regard to the
specific character of the architectural field.23

At several Scandinavian schools of architecture, discussions were held about

the importance of defining a more field-specific architectural epistemological
stance. Providing a direct incentive for these discussions were the new uni-
versity laws in Scandinavia, which demanded from all institutions of higher
education a more academically professional model of scholarship with a spe-
cial emphasis on doctoral programmes with organized research education.24

In March 1992, a Nordic network for collaboration in research education

for design professionals was established during their constitutive meeting
at Aarhus School of Architecture. These schools worked on establishing
doctoral programmes based on obligatory research education. Many issues
needed to be discussed at a broader level than national contexts, including
possible contexts and methods of research education in the fields of making
knowledge. The network organized a series of Nordic courses in research
education that, according to feedback from the PhD students who attended
them, contributed to the development of doctoral studies focused on estab-
lishing the identity of design thinking in architecture.25

Since the beginning of the 1990s, research education at several Scandinavian

schools of architecture has continuously moved towards a more field-specific
design scholarship. PhD students come mostly from backgrounds in various
making professions, and their research objects are derived most often from
their professional practice. The concept of the making disciplines gradually
coalesced into one of the epistemological premises for design research ed-

32 NORDISK ARKITEKTURFORSKNING – THE NORDIC ASSOCIATION OF ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH

ucation. In the Scandinavian context, this concept is not about a traditional
discipline in the strict sense, but rather an attempt to formulate a kind of
quality-supportive framework for making discourse.26 This framework ad-
dresses the criteria of both professional relevance and research scholarship.
This opens the possibility for developing a culture of dialogue with regard to
both practice and academia.

In 1996, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) offered the conference

Doctorates in Design and Architecture, which emphasized the scientific sta-
tus of design research as the basis for doctoral research in architecture. The
conference displayed a broad, differentiated, and specialized field of research
areas and issues.27 It made it clear that many universities had, at that time, an
inadequate research tradition. This collective awareness probably accelerated
the emergence of doctoral studies more specific to the field of architecture
and design, but it also visualized how the academic and professional worlds
were more or less two separate realms. Design approaches and methods were
recognized as important “partners” in addressing challenges in the built en-
vironment.

Four years later, this conference was followed by another international con-
ference called Research by Design.28 Presentations were made by both re-
searchers and professional practitioners. The architects were represented by,
among others, Ben van Berkel and Wiel Arets, who acted confidently and
convincingly, while researchers seemed much less confident of their legiti-
macy both with regard to the profession and to academia. This conference

Figure 3. The third phase in the development of doctoral scholarship in architecture and design in
Scandinavia (the 1990s).

THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE IN ARCHITECTURE BY PHD RESEARCH IN THE NORDIC COUNTRIES 33

 can be regarded as a turning point in the development of architectural re-
search, as it presented for the first time a continuum between scientific re-
search and creative practice, identifying research by design as a potential path
towards more field-specific research.

In 1997, a year after the first conference at TU Delft, a group under the aegis
of Christopher Frayling presented the influential report Practice-Based Doc-
torates in the Creative and Performing Arts and Design in the UK. They main-
tained that the development of research approaches in academic fields such
as the social sciences, humanities, and other established disciplines often had
lost features of “pure scientific methods”, allowing for hybrid modes – a phe-
nomenon the group described as “… a continuum from scientific research
to creative practice”.29 The second Delft conference seemed to illustrate this
phenomenon within the field of architecture.

Throughout the 1990s, a new awareness was growing in architectural milieus

of practitioners and educators. There were continuous efforts to recognize
designerly ways of thinking as eminent, equal-status contributors both to

Figure 4. Cover of the book for the Research by

Design conference in Delft in 2000.

34 NORDISK ARKITEKTURFORSKNING – THE NORDIC ASSOCIATION OF ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH

the new developments in contemporary society and to knowledge produc-
tion. More reflective use of the theoretical and methodological conceptions
borrowed from the established academic disciplines in architecture-based
research projects at the doctoral level succeeded in generating interdisci-
plinary research of high quality. The architectural research milieus built a
growing intellectual self-confidence during the 1990s. The Nordic schools
of architecture encouraged their PhD students to explore new field-specific
research approaches.

Internationally, several PhD programmes were initiated that also consciously

tried to develop formats for research that take the specific nature of archi-
tectural practice and its particular knowledge as a point of departure. In the
mid-1990s, the influential new PhD by the Architectural Design programme
at The Bartlett, University College London, offered doctoral studies that
would “primarily involve design research investigations that are carried out
as speculative and theoretical attempts to advance the discourse of architec-
ture as a broad intellectual subject”.30 During the same period, the Design
Practice Research programme at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia, began to
take shape as a PhD research programme,31 with the intention to “inculcate
an approach to research that was not ‘about’ design, but that was research in
the medium of design itself”.32

In this decade, the traditionally distinct lines between practitioners and the-
oreticians began to blur. The design studio remained at the core of teaching
architecture, and the relations between teachers and students usually con-
tinued to have the traditional master-apprentice character. Nevertheless, the
teachers of design who got involved in research no longer seemed to change
their loyalty to practice, but often sought instead to build bridges between
practice and theory by developing more field-specific research. Slowly, a
broader spectrum of practices emerged that included design practice, teach-
ing, and research.

THE 2000s:
NEW MODES OF DESIGN AND RESEARCH
During the first years of the new millennium, discussions intensified about
the specific features of architectural research with regard to professional
practice in the field. Much criticism was addressed to advanced architectural
research that heavily relied on disciplines outside of architecture. Many
doctoral theses borrowed their theoretical and methodological concep-

THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE IN ARCHITECTURE BY PHD RESEARCH IN THE NORDIC COUNTRIES 35

 tions from philosophy, sociology, literature, and cultural studies. It became
clear how challenging it was to competently assess such theses. Alejandro
Zaera-Polo maintained that “Often this has resulted in some of the most ad-
vanced research in architecture looking like bad movies, bad sociology, or
bad literature”.33

Zaera-Polo pleaded the importance of exploring architecture-specific knowl-

edge. He asserted that current research was aimed at fields of knowledge that
were either supra-disciplinary (philosophy, sociology, economy) or sub-dis-
ciplinary (construction management, engineering). He saw opportunities to
produce knowledge by integrating both these levels and held that this would
be thinkable through research engaged in using architectural practice and
processes of altering the built environment.

Some architectural offices, like MVRDV, Chora, Foreign Office Architects,

and UN Studio, decided to use architectural tools, supported by new tech-
nology, while analysing the complexity of contemporary society and ex-
ploring relations between various phenomena. Examples of new research
approaches combining architectural design tools and design projects to in-
vestigate knowledge fields and disciplines close to architecture and urbanism
are found in the postgraduate programme for architects at the Berlage In-
stitute in Rotterdam,34 and not least in the PhD programmes at The Bartlett
and the RMIT that developed further during the first decade of the century.

The Nordic network for collaboration strove to professionalize research ed-

ucation in the last years of the 1990s. One of their initiatives was to arrange
a Scandinavian research education programme in the years 1999 and 2001.
The group decided that the next phase of this collaboration should prepare
young researchers to meet the demands of new types of research and broader
expertise.35 In 2003, a new Nordic pilot study course called “Transdiscipli-
nary Research and the Making Professions” was arranged in order to intro-
duce doctoral students to the international debate on new modes of knowl-
edge production.

First and foremost, the course addressed transdisciplinarity as it was formu-

lated in the now-canonical work The New Production of Knowledge.37 This
work maintains that practice contexts are also sites for knowledge produc-
tion centred on specific problems close to their application. In transdiscipli-
nary research, both problems and solutions are defined beyond any single

36 NORDISK ARKITEKTURFORSKNING – THE NORDIC ASSOCIATION OF ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH

discipline. The authors of the book called this mode of knowledge produc-
tion Mode 2, as opposed to Mode 1, which is the traditional, academic mode
of research. Mode 2 and transdisciplinarity have enticed design scholars as a
new “in-practice” model of research that has strong similarities with design.
Slowly, the awareness that there already existed a “continuum from scien-
tific research to creative practice” grew in various academic milieus, and it
was probably one of the reasons that an increasing number of PhD projects
with integrated creative practice were accepted by adjudication committees
at various schools of architecture and design. The difference from the earlier
periods was that the creative practice was used not only for illustrative, but
also for explorative and argumentative approaches. Since the 1990s a contin-
uously growing number of research projects in Scandinavia can be regarded
as having been carried out “by design”. One can trace a longer history of this
trend, which started in the discussions of artistic development as early as the
1970s. In the first decade of this century, several PhD theses opened the door
to a bolder search for ways of carrying out field-specific research based on
creative practice in architecture and design.38

In the same period of time, there has been an increased interest in research
among architecture firms. Several Scandinavian firms, including White,
3xN, Arkitema, and Sweco, have intensified the use of research to support
innovation and creative design.39 They have developed research strategies for
collaborating with academia in both research and teaching.

As mentioned earlier, the development of research education and doctoral

scholarship in architecture and design in the Nordic countries was induced

Figure 5. The fourth phase in the development of doctoral scholarship in architecture and design in
Scandinavia (after 2000).

THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE IN ARCHITECTURE BY PHD RESEARCH IN THE NORDIC COUNTRIES 37

 by national university laws, thus urging the establishment of organized re-
search education in the region. The Bologna-Berlin guidelines expanded
such development to a broader European context. These guidelines appear
to induce doctoral research more towards Mode 2 of knowledge production
than towards Mode 1, which is in support of interaction between research
and practice.

The international conference The Unthinkable Doctorate, organized by the

Sint-Lucas School of Architecture and the Network for Theory, History and
Criticism of Architecture (NETHCA) in Brussels in 2005,40 has played an
important role in the debate on new modes of doctoral research. This confer-
ence, besides its broader international impact, supported the establishment
of Sint-Lucas’s own research education programme. The Bologna-Berlin pol-
icies acknowledged doctoral studies as the third cycle in European higher
education, and for the Sint-Lucas School of Architecture the guidelines of
the Bologna-Berlin process made it possible to develop experimental, prac-
tice-based concepts for research and doctoral scholarship.41

In 2009, the Sint-Lucas School of Architecture, in collaboration with Chal-

mers University of Technology, organized a new conference in Brussels
called Communicating (by) Design. The proceedings from the conferences
illustrate how the teaching milieu of the institution broadly engaged in ex-
perimental and investigative doctoral studies within a very young PhD mi-
lieu. The third conference of this series at Sint-Lucas School of Architecture,
Knowing (by) Designing, explored research derived from a broader spec-
trum of creative fields of architecture, design, art, and music, and pursued
various field-specific modes. Recently, a fourth conference was arranged in
Brussels in April 2017 on the theme of Impact by Designing, which discussed
the increasingly important aspect of the impact research has on society in
relation to architecture, design, art, and music.

The proceedings of this series of conferences in Delft and Brussels, especially

between 1996 and 2013, document the growing awareness among practi-
tioners, teachers, and researchers that their search for field-specific modes
of research build bridges between the field’s practice and its discourse, and
between this discourse and the realm of academia. While the first conference
in Delft in 1996 expressed a certain inextricable divergence of the field at the
time, the second in 2000 brought up the term and the concept of research by
design. The first Brussels conference in 2005 went still further by posing the

38 NORDISK ARKITEKTURFORSKNING – THE NORDIC ASSOCIATION OF ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH

Figure 6a. Cover of the proceedings of the con- Figure 6b. Cover of proceedings of the confe-
ference The Unthinkable Doctorate organized rence Communicating (by) Design organized by
by Sint-Lucas and NETHCA in Brussels, 2005.. Sint-Lucas and Chalmers in Brussels, 2009.

question of whether it would be possible to build doctoral scholarship in a

more field-specific mode than what constituted the traditional doctorates in
architecture. The second Belgian conference in 2009 reaffirmed this question
and debated the issue of disseminating this new scholarship – how and to
whom it should be communicated. The Brussels conference of 2013 present-
ed several radical epistemological grounds for design scholarship and for the
need to mediate these grounds with practice, education, and research. The
questions were also posed whether boundaries between these three notions
should not be challenged.

In studying the proceedings of the aforementioned conferences, one could

conclude that the profile of vocational studies has developed towards a new
phase. There is much evidence to support the conclusion that the spectrum
of various practices has become more nuanced: practice-based educators
have begun using teaching as practice experiments, closely related to re-
search experiments, and research-based teachers are including practice in
their work, which is increasingly field-specific. The various epistemological
stances and pedagogical positions have begun to permeate one another. The

THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE IN ARCHITECTURE BY PHD RESEARCH IN THE NORDIC COUNTRIES 39

 polarization observed in previous decades has strongly abated, and a more
graduated continuum from scientific research to creative practice is definite-
ly observable in various practices in the field of architecture and design.

THE 2010s:
MORE FIELD-SPECIFIC, PRACTICE-BASED RESEARCH
According to the proposed periodization of the development of design as a
field of inquiry, the most recent period began around 2010. It corresponds
with the start of a research programme under the name of “Architecture in
the Making: Architecture as a Making Discipline and Material Practice”,
which was endowed with a Strong Research Environment grant for 2011–17
from the Swedish Research Council Formas. This research programme was
part of an initiative in which the four schools of architecture in Sweden in-
itiated a national collaboration, including research and research education,
to strengthen architectural research and create a critical mass of researchers
and doctoral students. The aim of the research environment “Architecture in
the Making” has been to develop theories and methods from the perspective
of, and in collaboration with, architectural practice in order to reinforce ar-

Figure 7a. Cover of the book Reconstructing Figure 7b. Cover of the book The Changing
the Stockholm Exhibition by Atli Magnus Se- Shape of Practice: Integrating Research and
elow (Arkitektur förlag, 2016). Design in Architecture, edited by Michael Hen-
sel and Fredrik Nilsson (Routledge, 2016).

40 NORDISK ARKITEKTURFORSKNING – THE NORDIC ASSOCIATION OF ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH

chitectural research.44 A new, important aspect of the programme has been
the collective learning, training in, and practice of research in the wider com-
munities of professional practice and academia. Creative practices encounter
research collaboration with doctoral, postdoctoral, and senior research, often
in educational situations at the four Swedish schools of architecture. Together
they form “permeable practices” of design practitioners and research practi-
tioners in the creative fields. Seen from a perspective of several years, these
endeavours seem to have contributed to a more field-specific scholarship in
the milieus involved. One can perceive a growing intellectual self-confidence,
which espouses new, justifiable, field-specific academic autonomy instead of
the earlier tradition of “emulated scholarship”.

Seminars, symposia, and conferences have been organized around main

themes. Researchers with different perspectives on research are invited to
develop research projects, as well as to meet, exchange ideas and views, and
form frameworks grounded both in traditional academia and in the emerg-
ing approaches of research by design and also of other practice-based studies.
The results and activities have been published in various forms and include,

Figure 7c. Cover of the doctoral thesis An Figure 7d. The doctoral thesis The Photographic
Inquiry into the Re-Creative Workings of the Absolute: An Architectural Beginning by Pavlina
Unheimliche in Interior Architecture by Karel Lucas (AHO, 2014).
Deckers (Chalmers, 2015).

THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE IN ARCHITECTURE BY PHD RESEARCH IN THE NORDIC COUNTRIES 41

 for instance, historical studies that integrate teaching and research, and in
combination with traditional research methods use the practical methods of
building models as well as other tools from architectural practice as means
of architectural research.45 In parallel, and as another example, studies have
been conducted on how contemporary architectural practice is changing and
finding new forms as a result of the closer integration of research approach-
es into design work.46 Also, doctoral and licentiate theses have come out of
this environment, in which different practices from architectural education
and different methods of modelling, material experiments, and production
of artefacts are integrated into the research in order to articulate architectural
theories and methods.47 Some other examples have also emerged out of other
Nordic environments, in which a similar integration of research, practice,
and education takes new, innovative forms.48

One of the projects within the “making research environment” focuses on

the need for an adequate assessment of the output of innovative, field-spe-
cific design research. The authors pledge that in order to achieve recogni-
tion for the results of such innovative research among both practitioners and
researchers of architecture (and other knowledge producers), principles for
assessing this kind of research should be debated in a broader contention
between design practice and (design) academia. Various practices, such as
design and research practices, discursive and making practices, hermeneu-
tic and material practice, all of them within a continuum between scientific
research and creative practice, are “permeable” and demand specific criti-
cism and assessment better attuned to this “permeability” between modes of
practice. The authors maintain that adequate assessment of research results
in practice-based, creative fields should build on a double judgement of both
practitioners and scholars through negotiations between connoisseurship
and criticism.49

At the current moment, we perceive “making scholarship” as a broad and

inclusive field of inquiry that invites traditional research as well as the most
innovative experiments to be carried out as research by design or by art. In
this new landscape of making scholarship, we see a place for hybrid modes
of research that could take different positions on the continuum between
scientific research and creative practice.

42 NORDISK ARKITEKTURFORSKNING – THE NORDIC ASSOCIATION OF ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH

CONCLUDING REMARKS
This article was inspired by a statement by the renowned American archi-
tecture and design scholar Julia Williams Robinson, written in 2001 – dur-
ing the third decade of the international debate on building a sustainable
field of inquiry in architecture and design. She maintained that architecture
was “an emerging discipline that involves professional practice, research and
teaching”. Further on, she claimed that the responsibility for each of these
spheres of activity belongs to separate groups with specialized expertise who
are jointly responsible to society and to each other. We examined the va-
lidity of Robinson’s statement with regard to the developments in the field
of architecture and design in Scandinavia, and made some detours to other
European countries to contextualize the developments in the Nordic region.

In the decades prior to the mid-1970s, design and architectural research

was not considered pertinent to professional practice and thus was seen as
marginal. Design scholarship of that period relied mostly on mature practi-
tioners who reflected on their life’s work. Teachers were practitioners. There
was no need for communicating the practitioner-researchers’ reflections to
others outside of their professional circles. Doctoral knowledge was largely a
more advanced professional debate.

The period between the mid-1970s and 1990 brought about various national
policies that demanded developing research also in the vocational fields of
academia, including architecture. With no models of their own for field-spe-
cific scholarship, the aspiring researchers attempted to build a timid, uncriti-
cal dialogue with academia while looking for theoretical and methodological
frameworks of established academic disciplines. This period can be charac-
terized by architectural research, primarily PhD research, of weak relevance
to the practice, on one hand, and often naive use of intellectual tools bor-
rowed from academia, on the other. A polarization emerged between practi-
tioners and researchers in the field of architecture and design.

In the 1990s and at the beginning of the new century, a stronger intellectual
self-confidence developed among design scholars. They strove for research
that would be more pertinent to professional practice, and at the same time
more reflective and critical with regard to using the theoretical and method-
ological tools from academically established disciplines. In this period, many
attempts by PhD students were made to develop field-specific modes of re-
search, and several innovative PhD programmes were initiated internation-

THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE IN ARCHITECTURE BY PHD RESEARCH IN THE NORDIC COUNTRIES 43

 ally. Teaching was slowly becoming an acknowledged arena of developing
scholarship. Practice, teaching, and research came closer to one another.

In the most recent years, an even stronger movement towards field-specific

research can be noted. It coincides with the growing awareness of a contin-
uum from creative practice to scientific research, of the potential of research
by art and by design, of inter- and transdisciplinarity that recognize design-
erly ways of thinking. We can observe a kind of “permeability” between var-
ious kinds of architecture and design practice. The statement by Julia Wil-
liams Robinson can therefore be slightly modified. Architects and designers
as individuals have developed joined, synergistic expertise with regard to
professional practice, teaching, and research. Even if this phenomenon is still
limited in terms of volume, it will continue to grow over time through the
complex and advanced contemporary practice and through the education of
new generations of architects and designers.

This article followed how PhD knowledge in architecture and design has
changed over time. It sketched diachronically how the field of architecture
and design has developed over several decades with regard to its three con-
stituent components: professional practice, teaching, and research; and how
these components were initially separate, then became oppositional, before
recently starting to converge in order to synergistically permeate one an-
other. It is also clear that organized doctoral studies began rather early in
Scandinavia compared with many other European countries, and together
with the UK and the Netherlands, for example, the Scandinavian countries
seem to have been at the forefront of doctoral studies in architecture even
internationally. Most European countries began to follow the policies in this
respect at the time of the Bologna-Berlin declaration (2003), a decade af-
ter the Scandinavian countries adopted their respective university laws. The
most recent developments in architectural research and in doctoral studies in
Scandinavia, where research has become even more integrated with practice
than earlier, have been noticed and reviewed by international scholars (e.g.
Linda Groat, David Wang, and Murray Fraser).

One intention of the article has been to give design practitioners and schol-
ars a broader awareness about and stronger confidence in the importance of
various forms of practice in their work – both the professionally specialized
practices and the “permeable” ones. Another objective has been to encourage
present and prospective doctoral students to search for ever more adequate

44 NORDISK ARKITEKTURFORSKNING – THE NORDIC ASSOCIATION OF ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH

forms of field-specific PhD knowledge in dialogue with a broad audience.
This audience is clearly growing today – and is becoming even more multi-
faceted and innovative through a broad range of actors – with the increasing
interest in and relevance of research in contemporary architectural practice
and education.

NOTES
1
Fredric Jameson,“Periodizing the 60s”, Social Text, 9/10 (Spring–Summer 1984), pp. 178–209,
esp. p. 178.
2
Halina Dunin-Woyseth,“On Designed Knowledge Artefacts”, in Johan Verbeke and Adam
Jakimowicz (eds.), Communication (by) Design (Brussels: School of Architecture Sint-Lucas,
2009).
3
Julia Williams Robinson, “Form and Structure of Architectural Knowledge: From Practice to
Discipline”, in Andrzej Piotrowski and Julia Williams Robinson (eds.), The Discipline of Archi-
tecture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 62.
4
Halina Dunin-Woyseth and Fredrik Nilsson, “Building a Culture of Doctoral Scholarship in
Architecture and Design: A Belgian-Scandinavian Case”, Nordic Journal of Architectural Resear-
ch, 1/23 (2011), pp. 41–55; Halina Dunin-Woyseth and Fredrik Nilsson, “Research as a Driving
Force for Change: On Triadic Practice in Architecture”, Reflections +17 (2013).
5
Linda Groat and David Wang, Architectural Research Methods, 2nd edn. (Hoboken: Wiley,
2013).
6
Ibid., p. vii.
7
Ibid., pp. 3–4.
8
Nel Janssens, Utopia-Driven Projective Research: A Design Approach to Explore the Theory and
Practice of Meta-Urbanism (Gothenburg: Chalmers University of Technology, 2012).
9
Groat and Wang, Architectural Research Methods, pp. 56–57.
Murray Fraser, “Introduction”, in Design Research in Architecture: An Overview (Farnham:
10

Ashgate, 2013), pp. 1–14, esp. pp. 1–2.

11
Ibid., p. 9.
12
Ashraf M. Salama and Nicholas Wilkinson, Design Studio Pedagogy: Horizons for the Future
(Gateshead: The Urban International Press, 2007), pp. 3–8.
13
Jadwiga Krupinska, What an Architecture Student Should Know (New York: Routledge, 2014),
pp. 10–11; Jadwiga Krupinska, Att skapa det tänkta (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2016), pp. 9–11.
14
Claes Caldenby, “Architecture at Chalmers 1856–2016”, Tabita Nilsson, Lotta Särnbratt, and
Fredrik Nilsson (eds.), Chalmers School of Architecture Yearbook 2016 (Gothenburg: Chalmers
University of Technology, 2016), pp. 12 and 23–25.
15
Halina Dunin-Woyseth Fredrik Nilsson, “Building (Trans)Disciplinary Architectural Resear-
ch: Introducing Mode 1 and Mode 2 to Design Practitioners”, in Isabelle Doucet and Nel Jans-
sens (eds.), Transdisciplinary Knowledge Production in Architecture and Urbanism (Dordrecht:
Springer, 2011), pp. 82–83.

THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE IN ARCHITECTURE BY PHD RESEARCH IN THE NORDIC COUNTRIES 45

 16
Bobo Hjort, “Hundred Years of Swedish Architectural Research”, Nordic Journal of Architectural
Research, 4 (2002), p. 85.
17
Ibid., p. 85.
18
Salama and Wilkinson, Design Studio Pedagogy, p. 5.
19
Claes Caldenby, “Forskning och praktik: Särart eller samverkan?”, Nordisk Arkitekturfors-
kning, 1–2 (2000), pp. 97–100; Hjort, “Hundred Years of Swedish Architectural Research”, p. 86.
20
Halina Dunin-Woyseth, “Making-Based Knowledge: Between Identity and Change”, in
Ashraf M. Salama, William O’Reilly, and Kay Noschis (eds.), Architectural Education Today:
Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Lausanne: Comportements, 2002).
21
See, for example, K. Michael Hays (ed.), Architecture Theory since 1968 (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1998); Kate Nesbitt (ed.), Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology
of Architectural Theory, 1965–1995 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996).
22
See, for example, Raoul Bunschoten, Takuro Hoshino, and Hélène Binet, Urban Flotsam:
Stirring the City (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2001); Rem Koolhaas, S,M,L,XL (New York: The
Monacelli Press, 1995); Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs, and Richard Koek (eds.), FARMAX: Excur-
sions on Density (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1998).
23
Jerker Lundequist, The Idea of Architectural Research and Its Relation to Philosophy (Stock-
holm: KTH, 1999), p. 7.
24
Dunin-Woyseth and Nilsson, “Building (Trans)Disciplinary Architectural Research”, p. 84.
25
Halina Dunin-Woyseth, “The ‘Millennium Programme’: Looking Back, Looking Forward”,
Nordic Journal of Architectural Research, 2 (2002).
26
Halina Dunin-Woyseth and Jan Michl, “Towards a Disciplinary Identity of the Making Pro-
fessions: An Introduction”, in Towards a Disciplinary Identity of the Making Professions (Oslo:
AHO, 2001).
27
Annemieke Bal-Sanders, Leen van Duin, Richard Foqué, Herbert van Hoogdalem, Floor
Moormann, Theo van der Voordt, and Herman van Wegen (eds.), Doctorates in Design and
Architecture: Conference Book (Delft: Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology,
1996); idem (eds.), Doctorates in Design and Architecture: Proceedings Volume 1 – State of the
Art (Delft: Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology, 1996); idem (eds.), Doctora-
tes in Design and Architecture: Proceedings Volume 2 – Results and Reflections (Delft: Faculty of
Architecture, Delft University of Technology, 1996).
28
Anneloes Nieuwenhuis and Marieke van Ouwerkerk, Research by Design. Conference Book
(Delft: Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology, 2000); Marieke van Ouwerkerk
and Jurgen Rosemann, eds., Research by Design. Proceedings A (Delft: DUP Science, 2001).
29
Christopher Frayling, Valerie Stead, Bruce Archer, Nicholas Cook, James Powel, Victor Sage,
Stephen Scrivener, and Michael Tovey (eds.), Practice-Based Doctorates in the Creative and
Performing Arts and Design (Lichfield: UK Council for Graduate Education, 1997), p. 15.
30
Murray Fraser, “Preserving Openness in Design Research in Architecture”, in Fredrik Nils-
son, Halina Dunin-Woyseth, and Nel Janssens (eds.), Perspectives on Research Assessment in
Architecture, Music and the Arts: Discussing Doctorateness (London and New York: Routledge,
2017), p. 73.

46 NORDISK ARKITEKTURFORSKNING – THE NORDIC ASSOCIATION OF ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH

31
Colin Fudge and Adriana Partal, “Design Practice Research in Architecture and Design
at RMIT University: Discovery, Reflection and Assessment”, in Fredrik Nilsson, Halina
Dunin-Woyseth, and Nel Janssens (eds.), Perspectives on Research Assessment in Architecture,
Music and the Arts: Discussing Doctorateness (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp.
86–87.
32
Leon van Schaik, “The Evolution of the Invitational Program in Design Practice Research”,
in Leon van Schaik and Anna Johnson (eds.), Architecture & Design by Practice, by Invitation:
Design Practice Research at RMIT (Melbourne: onepointsixone, 2011), pp. 14–37, esp. p. 20.
33
Alejandro Zaera-Polo, “Disciplines”, in Penelope Dean (ed.), Hunch 9: Disciplines (Rotter-
dam: Episode Publishers, 2005), p. 4.
34
See, for example, Dean, Hunch 9: Disciplines.
35
Dunin-Woyseth, “The ‘Millennium Programme’”.
36
Halina Dunin-Woyseth and Liv Merete Nielsen (eds.), Discussing Transdisciplinarity: Making
Professions and the New Mode of Knowledge Production (Oslo: AHO, 2004).
37
Michael Gibbons, Camille Limoges, Helga Nowotny, Simon Schwartzman, Peter Scott, and
Martin Trow, The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Con-
temporary Societies (London: Sage Publications, 1994); see also Helga Nowotny, “The Potential
of Transdisciplinarity”, in Halina Dunin-Woyseth and Liv Merete Nielsen (eds.), Discussing
Transdisciplinarity: Making Professions and the New Mode of Knowledge Production (Oslo:
AHO, 2004).
38
See, for example, Cheryl Akner-Koler, Form & Formlessness: Questioning Aesthetic Abstracti-
ons in Cross-Disciplinary Studies, Art Projects and Product Design Education (Stockholm: Axl
Books, 2007); Katja Grillner, Ramble, Linger, and Gaze: Dialogues from the Landscape Garden
(Stockholm: KTH, 2000); Eirin Pedersen, Mellan tecken, teckning, teori och text (Oslo: AHO,
2004); Jonas Runberger, Architectural Prototypes (Stockholm: KTH, 2008); Birger Sevaldson,
Developing Digital Design Techniques: Investigations on Creative Design Computing (Oslo: AHO,
2005).
39
Fredrik Nilsson, “Architectural Laborations: Setting Up Research as Strategic Tools in Archi-
tectural Practice”, in Johan Verbeke and Burak Pak (eds.), Knowing (by) Designing (Brussels:
LUCA, 2013).
40
Marc Belderbos and Johan Verbeke (eds.), The Unthinkable Doctorate (Brussels: School of
Architecture Sint-Lucas, 2007).
41
Nel Janssens, “The Sint-Lucas Research Training Sessions”, in Nel Janssens (ed.), Reflections
+3 (Brussels and Ghent: Sint-Lucas Architectuur, 2006), p. 9; Johan Verbeke, “Research by
Design in Architecture and in the Arts”, in Reflections +7 (Brussels: Sint-Lucas Architectuur,
2008), pp. 12–13.
Johan Verbeke and Adam Jakimowicz (eds.), Communicating (by) Design (Brussels: School of
42

Architecture Sint-Lucas, 2009).

43
Johan Verbeke and Burak Pak (eds.), Knowing (by) Designing (Brussels: LUCA, 2013).
Fredrik Nilsson, “Knowledge in the Making: On Production and Communication of
44

Knowledge in the Material Practices of Architecture”, FORMakademisk, 6/2 (2013).

45
Atli Magnus Seelow, Reconstructing the Stockholm Exhibition 1930 (Stockholm: Arkitetur
förlag, 2016).

THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE IN ARCHITECTURE BY PHD RESEARCH IN THE NORDIC COUNTRIES 47

 46
Michael Hensel and Fredrik Nilsson (eds.), The Changing Shape of Practice: Integrating Rese-
arch and Design in Architecture (London and New York: Routledge, 2016).
47
Karel Deckers, An Inquiry into the Re-Creative Workings of the Unheimliche in Interior
Architecture (Gothenburg: Chalmers University of Technology, 2015); Stig Anton Nielsen,
Mixed Substrate Computation: Sensor Based Artificial Cognition for Architectural Design and
Modification (Gothenburg: Chalmers University of Technology, 2016); Daniel Norell, Taming
the Erratic: Representation and Materialization in Post-Digital Architectural Design (Stockholm:
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, 2016); Anna Maria Orru, Organoleptic Interfaces: Explor-
ing Embodied Methods in Foodscapes (Gothenburg: Chalmers University of Technology, 2016).
48
See, for example, Pavlina Lucas, The Photographic Absolute: An Architectural Beginning (Oslo:
Oslo School of Architecture and Design, 2014).
49
Halina Dunin-Woyseth and Fredrik Nilsson, “Doctorateness in Design Disciplines: Negoti-
ating Connoisseurship and Criticism in Practice-Related Fields”, FORMakademisk, 5/2 (2012);
Dunin-Woyseth and Nilsson, “Emerging ‘Doctorateness’ in Creative Fields of Architecture,
Art and Design: Some Experiences from a Nordic-Belgian Context”, in Torbjörn Lind (ed.),
Artistic Research Then and Now: 2004–13 (Stockholm: Swedish Research Council, 2013);
Dunin-Woyseth and Nilsson, “Emerging Epistemic Communities and Cultures of Evidence:
On the Practice of Assessment of Research in the Creative Fields”, in Fredrik Nilsson, Halina
Dunin-Woyseth, and Nel Janssens (eds.), Perspectives on Research Assessment in Architecture,
Music and the Arts: Discussing Doctorateness (London and New York: Routledge, 2017).
50
Dunin-Woyseth and Nilsson, “Doctorateness in Design Disciplines”; Dunin-Woyseth and
Nilsson, “Emerging Epistemic Communities and Cultures of Evidence”; Eisner, “Educational
Connoisseurship and Criticism: Their Form and Function in Educational Evaluation”, Journal
of Aesthetic Education, 10/3–4 (1976), pp. 135–50.

48 NORDISK ARKITEKTURFORSKNING – THE NORDIC ASSOCIATION OF ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH