The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

foundations

after this sequence, no summary is proposed, as the diagrams are not regarded as
complete ‘products’. They serve to open up a dialogue with prospective doctoral
students and can be changed in the future when good arguments for doing so come up.

Constructing the diagram ‘introduction to knowledge forms and knowledge production’

Doctoral scholarship in architecture and design until the mid-1970s

during the ‘initial phase’, until the mid-1970s, phd students derived their subject
of research from their professional or pedagogical practice. The motivation to take
a doctoral degree was most often to conclude a professional career by reflecting on
one’s professional interests. The doctoral students carried out their research in the
framework of an individual arrangement with their supervisors, most of whom were not
scholars, but highly esteemed practitioners. it was not unusual that a doctoral candidate
spent 15–20 years on preparing his or, far more rarely, her scholarly ‘opus’. Very few
doctoral degrees were conferred on practitioners. The doctoral theses represented a
kind of professional internal discussion with the subject matter. attempts to engage
in an academic dialogue with the traditional knowledge disciplines were few and far
between. The language of these theses is most often that of informed professionals, not
that of scholars seeking broader academic communication.
i began to sketch the diagram by drawing a horizontal line, representing time, but
also a traditional split between the everyday world, including the matters connected
with architecture and its practice, and the world of academic knowledge production
as expressed by academic disciplines. i marked the first time period, the middle of the
1970s, by a vertical line. This period is characterized by a series of university laws in the
scandinavian countries, which made a strong impact on doctoral scholarship in these
countries. i drew under the horizontal line a hatched circular figure, thus signifying the
practice field of architecture. above the line i drew several oblong, contour- marked
figures to represent academic disciplines, like sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc.
They remain unfilled to denote their ‘non- material’ character as opposed to the ‘material’
character of architecture and its everyday practice. Both kinds of figures were clearly
drawn to indicate that they in a way represented autonomous entities. Two crossed
arrows between the circular figure and the oblong ones are meant to illustrate that there
was not much dialogue between the world of architectural scholars and that of academia.
The ‘products’ of the architectural research seem to remain in the realm of practice.

Figure 4.1 doctoral scholarship until the mid-1970s.