Advancing Practice: how can emerging models of doctoral study help support architecture and creative practice?
Can doctoral study provide practitioners with a valid approach to expanding their understanding of personal practice, and to deepening and future proof practice thinking and agency? This paper aims to explore the potential for doctoral education to develop research for practice and to support the very development of architectural practice itself.
The formal education of architects has tended to end with the completion of professional accredited programmes, and at the point of entry to the profession. While providing a springboard into practice, the resulting trajectory appears of limited range. While CPD remains essential, few architects return to the Academy to develop specialisms or to interrogate and develop their own creative practice in a more robust and rigorous way. While the length of the formal education and a lack of funding have been seen as barriers to postgraduate and doctoral study, research degrees have often been focused on technology, history and theory where research activities and outputs more comfortably connect to accepted academic research norms.
But what can doctoral level study offer practicing architects, who see themselves first and foremost in engaged in a creative practice? How can creative practice in its many guises be embraced as a legitimate and vital form of research? Can that research be at “ zero distance” from the practice itself and provide new knowledge and understanding to support the sustained development to maturity and master.
The ADAPT-r network of seven European schools of Architecture, aims both to build research capacity for creative practice through developing research training consistent with practice, and in considering how networks and peer review can best serve practitioner researchers. Initiatives such as the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities can provide insights from other disciplines as to how architectural research might form the basis for the shaping of future practice itself.
These projects point to the necessity to rethink how and where doctoral education and practice meet, particularly if our understanding of practice is to deepen and the range of disciplinary research necessary to support this is to be recognised.
If practice at its best is an activity that involves speculation, exploration, reflection and reflexivity how can Architecture schools develop structures that better engage with this dynamic activity, and support mastery in practice and in the profession. What are the opportunities and challenges this presents for schools of architecture in attracting and supporting research for practice?
The paper will also consider how developing models such as PHD by design and by practice currently emerging in architecture schools, which may offer both the opportunity for practitioners to evidence their mastery of practice, and to advance the discussion of architecture as an discipline and creative industry

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