AHO WORKS RESEARCH 2012
PhD Programme
Students are encouraged to sift through this
material of differences and shifts, in order to
construct new patterns, new understandings
and new surfaces for academic exchange.
There is much at stake when the status of
disciplines or crafts or practices is altered. Leon
Battista Alberti’s 15th century texts claimed ar-
chitecture as a valid field of operation for those
trained in the liberal arts, and identified de-
sign as an intellectual activity to be articulated
amid craft action. The success of this claimhad
huge implications. It established among other
things the modern conception of an authorial
relationship between an architect, or an artist,
or a designer, and a work. In a knowledge soci-
ety, to claim design, architecture, urbanism and
landscape as research disciplines creates pos-
sibilities as radical as those that transformed
the societal significance of architecture and art
during the early renaissance. AHO’s PhD Pro-
gramme sees a role in training actors for this
extended field.
speculate on its effect on what is happening in
each research centre. When did the discourse
around this subject start and why?What kind of
questions can be asked and answered within this
discourse? Based on what kind of enquiry, evi-
dence or researchmaterial?What are the habits
of communication for this enquiry? What have
been the key areas of dispute in the develop-
ment of this discourse? What are its allies, and
from where does it habitually adopt methods?
At AHO today one is presented with research
groups that are increasingly able to articu-
late the specificity of their methods; research
groups that engage in established and discreet
contexts of publication; research groups that
create varied opportunities for connecting fo-
cused findings with broad cultural concerns
and agendas. At this point it becomes impor-
tant both to articulate the communality of
these areas and their differences; to point out
both how they are the same and different; to
highlight the specificity of their involvement
in projecting a future world of manmade ob-
jects and environments, and the discreet op-
portunities that their various methods offer. In
supporting the development of PhDs in these
research areas, this is a moment to be enjoyed.
Tim Anstey
Chair of PhD Programme
AHO
