A Proposal for the PhD in Architecture: Toward the “Nocturnal Sky,” and Toggling Between Research and Practice

If we accept the premise that architecture is an academic discipline in addition to being a professional one, then what is its object of study? What does it mean to teach, research and know architecture, today? Such questions have a history. Gottfried Semper, for example, had similar concerns in the nineteenth century. He was critical of an over-specialized education that thwarts the creative artistic spirit, one that “kills the very faculty that is actively responsible for the perception and, equally, the creation of art.” Semper thought, instead, that the “thirst for knowledge” must assume “the character of research and active, independent activity.” The object of this activity was to find an empirical theory of style in an age of industrial reproduction. Neither pure nor abstract, this theory would consist of the “inner law” governing those “constituent parts of form that are not form itself but rather the idea, the force, the material, and the means – in other words, the basic preconditions of form.” Semper’s Style is contemporaneous with other key texts of the nineteenth century such as Marx’s Capital and Darwin’s The Origin of Species. If the former deals with the reproduction of money and the latter with the reproduction of species, Semper’s Style deals with the reproduction of culture. The model for such reproduction is nature. The very first line of his “Prolegomena” reads: The nocturnal sky shows glimmering nebulae among the splendid miracle of stars – either old extinct systems scattered throughout the universe, cosmic dust taking shape around a nucleus, or a condition in between destruction and regeneration.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Teach.2019.40

Volume Editors
Richard Blythe & Johan De Walsche

ISBN
978-1-944214-23-4