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AHO WORKS RESEARCH 2012
PhD Programme
their involvement with history. History, which
by definition could only be studied via what
had been articulated and spoken, tended to be
left aside in the turn away from discourse to un-
cover and articulate the unspoken knowledge
in design. One of the intriguing conditions in
creating a common platform between AHO’s
research centres today is that there is, now, a
history of their development as research dis-
ciplines to be studied, to be understood and
to be used projectively. Those histories vary
in length – Urbanism’s begins with founding
texts at the start of the 19th century but came
of age within the development of the Europe-
an welfare states during the mid 20th century.
Design, and the History of Architecture can
point to founding moments in the 1960s when
they began to be constituted as independent
research disciplines in their own right. Archi-
tecture and Landscape are both more complex
– tracing traditions of theoretical discourse into
the 15th and 18th centuries respectively, but ac-
tually still developing their identity as modern
research disciplines today.
In these terms AHO’s slightly distinctive
structure of research centres, which outlines
design (Centre for Design Research), archi-
tecture and technology (RCAT), urbanism
and landscape and the history and theory of
architecture (OCCAS) as research areas, might
suddenly prove advantageous. Teaching within
the AHO PhD Programme must look seriously
at the specifics of these various cultures, and
were still ‘quiet’ disciplines. Thus the strong
effort was to vocalise this value – to look at pro-
cesses, mechanisms and guiding frameworks in
these disciplines that had not previously been
articulated, and to present them in terms that
academic science and humanities discourse
could understand.
As a process of validating a group of disci-
plines and their methods as research, this can
be seen as an outstanding success. Although
the story is complex, the signs are that uni-
versity departments of design, architecture,
urbanism and landscape are now arguing suc-
cessfully for resources based on the potential
of an intimate connection between objective
research and emergent practice. The situat-
edness of design, architecture, urbanism and
landscape plays into an evolving idea about
the interrelation between research and socie-
ty, particularly played out in the attention paid
to “impact” in modern research assessments.
The success of this collective effort offers new
platforms on which to discuss the communality
and, importantly, the specificity of these disci-
plines. In that reassessment there is room for
investigating aspects that were played down in
establishing their research value.
The discourse around designerly ways of
knowing, from its start, underlined the in-
volvement of the making disciplines with both
theory and technology. At the risk of sounding
simplistic, one could say that this discourse
drew much less information out of looking at
