AHO WORKS Studies 2012
Highlights
Guest lectures
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R&D AHO
AHOWorks Research
has evolved from a catalogue that
documented and surveyed the school’s annual R&D
results. Architecture and design are built on an amal-
gam of knowledge traditions: the humanities, fine arts,
social sciences, natural sciences, engineering sciences
and technological research. The knowledge bases of
the “making disciplines” are, however, mainly derived
from practice, denoted in the term “development”, and
in the Norwegian accountancy system’s term “artistic
development”.
Until the 1980s AHO was primarily oriented to-
wards the fine arts and craftsmanship. Apart from in
the fields of technology and art history (understood as
the history of architecture and design), the school pri-
marily articulated knowledge out of practice. In 1985,
Raf De Saeger was the first to be awarded a PhD degree
with the thesis “Wooden Architecture. Identity and
Structure”, supervised by Christian Norberg-Schulz.
In 2004 design’s first PhD candidate Jan Capjon grad-
uated with a dissertation on ”Trial-and-Error-based
Innovation”. 70 candidates have since passed their
PhD degrees at the school. Parallel to this AHO has
become a specialized university, where the faculty has
rights and duties in the research field.
AHO has completed a comprehensive turnaround.
The fundamental reorientation from the applied
sciences towards research has spurred major changes
in the School over the last two decades. A long process
has been undertaken to develop systematic and docu-
mentable R&D. In size, the research activity at AHO is
comparable to the activity in more traditional academ-
ic environments, like the Norwegian School of Veter-
inary Science or the Norwegian School of Economics.
Norway measures research results in “publishing
points” using a relatively intricate reward system. To
be counted, the results must be peer-reviewed and
published in approved publication channels. In 2012,
AHO accumulated 52.3 points in scientific publish-
ing. This equals more than one scientific article per
faculty member. Five PhD candidates graduate from
AHO every year, measured in three-year cycles. In
2013 the number of candidates will be close to ten. The
R&D turnover was 10,000,000 kroner from a total of
150,000,000 kroner. The external funding is mainly
provided by the Research Council of Norway, but the
commissioned research activities and the number of
EU-funded projects are increasing.
All four Institutes now run research projects funded
by the Research Council of Norway. With the restart
of the Centre for Urbanism and Landscape Studies (at
the Institute of Urbanism and Landscape), by 2014 all
of AHO’s institutes will have established research cen-
tres. OCCAS – Oslo Centre for Critical Architectural
Studies at the Institute of Form, Theory and History,
RCAT ¬ Research Centre for Architecture and Tech-
nology at the Institute for Architecture and the Centre
for Design Research at the Institute of Design, all work
within international networks.
In the annual repport for 2012 the following results
from AHO’s research activities were highlighted:
