interfaces these four hold with theory, technol-
ogy and history. This is a demanding agenda,
because of the breadth of its scope. From its
start, the programme has been based on a com-
pulsory taught component common to all doc-
toral students at AHO, the PhD School, which
takes place over the first year of PhD study.
The argument for a common platform for
preparing doctoral students across AHO’s re-
search centres can be made in various ways. A
strong tradition has been to structure teaching
based on a communality of culture between de-
sign, architecture, urbanism and landscape as
‘making disciplines’, finding interconnecting
themes that link them. This strategy emphasis-
es the importance of practice-based knowledge
across the four areas. It theorizes these design-
erly ways of knowing, and argues for their val-
ue within academic and research culture.
The long commitment of the AHO PhD
School to this agenda was part of an interna-
tional focus, that originated in a developing
research discourse around design in the 1970s,
and which was adopted into architecture from
the 1990s as part of the digital turn. At root
this strategy involves a rhetoric that identifies
design, architecture, urbanism and landscape
as fields where the existing discourse has not
revealed, or has not needed to reveal, the extent
or value of the knowledge that is generated. De-
spite their long existence and their wide habits
of publication, the argument was that, in terms
of arguing their own validity as research, these
Can you construct knowledge? For one found-
ing figure in the discourse around architecture
and design, this question resolved itself into a
single term. At the cutting edge of the academ-
ic discourse in 15th century Italy, Leon Battista
Alberti spoke of
aedificatoria
– of “building” as
“edifying”. Alberti’s treatise
De re aedificatoria
(“about building” or “on the art of building”)
validated a particular set of practices that
produced man-made objects in the world, as
knowledge. It dignified the work connected to
what was a ‘menial’ occupation (
architectura
was one of the
artes mechanicae
, like cooking or
tailoring) as philosophical, requiring a training
in the liberal arts.
In other texts Alberti sees this higher intel-
lectual world itself as a shifting landscape of
man-made fragments. The action of the philos-
opher is to search through this heap, rummag-
ing, drawing up pieces and disposing them, one
against another, in new patterns. Constructing
knowledge is like laying a cosmati floor - each
fragment brings with it an authority, something
to do with its provenance, a guarantee of value.
The new pattern communicates a new idea. This
metaphor of knowledge constructed as both a
foundation – an iridescent surface on which
actions and arguments can happen – and a legi-
ble pattern, a multi-coloured pavement, speaks
strongly in a school of architecture and design.
The AHO PhD Programme provides training
for higher research in design, architecture, ur-
banism and landscape studies, and the various
Sifting, shifting, placing
