ConCave*

Ph.D. Student Group


*ConCave is a Ph.D. Student-led group in the School of Architecture of the College of Design at Georgia Tech. The group aims at supporting Ph.D. students and their research.





DIVERGENCE IN ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH 2023





Book Launch:
DIVERGENCE IN ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH 2023
Proceedings of ConCave Ph.D. Symposium 2022

Douglas Haskell Award for Student Journals

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Editors:
Hayri Dortdivanlioglu
Eleanna Panagoulia
Yeinn Oh

School of Architecture Publication
January 2023

ISBN 978-1-7364944-1-7
We are excited to announce that our publication, "Divergence in Architectural Research," has been awarded the prestigious Douglas Haskell Award for Student Journals. This award supports student journalism on architecture, planning, and related subjects, encouraging intellectual criticism among emerging professionals.

This second volume of Divergence in Architectural Research brings together nineteen papers presented at the ConCave Ph.D. Symposium 2022, which took place at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia on April 7-8, 2022. This international doctorate symposium was organized by the ConCave Ph.D. Student Group under the auspices of the School of Architecture and the College of Design at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The symposium sought to create a platform for sharing current research in architecture, with invited scholars and other doctoral students from architecture and allied fields. It was our desire to create an opportunity to gather, exchange formal as well as spontaneous conversations in research, and explore possibilities of collaboration.

Right after the first ConCave Ph.D. Symposium in mid-March of 2020, like the entire world we found ourselves following planetary regulations and procedures dictated by the Covid-19 Pandemic. While the success of the first symposium raised the bar for the next event, besides our ambitions, we had to tackle with the daunting task of bringing Ph.D. scholars together during an on-going world health emergency. While in the last two years we learnt more about how to control and fight the disease, we were not certain about the possibility of an in-person symposium considering the emerging variants and the limited distribution of the vaccines only in some privileged regions of the world. The pandemic made the inequities and the issues of access to resources more visible in every aspect of human life, but more so in our Ph.D. community.

The isolation during the peak of the pandemic proved the necessity and importance of the ConCave Ph.D. Group and the Ph.D. Symposium. On the one hand, it showed us the value of belonging to a community and having a safe space to get together and interact with our peers and friends. On the other hand, the inequities emerging after Covid-19 compelled us to reimagine the structure of the symposium. In addition to physical gathering made possible by adoption of precautions, such as vaccination, mask wearing, and regular rapid Covid-19 testing, we offered a virtual space, in which the presenters and participants from all over the world followed the symposium and interacted with the other participants.

DIVERGENCE IN ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH 2021





Book Launch:
DIVERGENCE IN ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH 2021
Proceedings of ConCave Ph.D. Symposium 2020

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Editors:
Hayri Dortdivanlioglu
Marisabel Marratt

School of Architecture Publication
January 2021

ISBN 978-0-9615650-1-5
The essays in this volume have come together under the theme “Divergence in Architectural Research” and present a snapshot of Ph.D. research being conducted in over thirty architectural research institutions, representing fourteen countries around the world. These essays also provide a window into the presentations and discussions that took place March 5-6, 2020, during the ConCave Ph.D. Symposium “Divergence in Architectural Research,” under the auspices of the School of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, Georgia.

On a preliminary reading, the essays respond to the call of divergence by doing just that; they present the great diversity of research topics, methodologies, and practices currently found under the umbrella of “architectural research.” They inform inquiry within architectural programs and across disciplinary concentrations, and also point to the ways that the academy, research methodologies, and the design profession are evolving and encroaching upon one another, with the unspoken hope of encouraging new relationships, reconfiguring previous assumptions about the discipline, and interweaving research and practice.The research that follows does not seek to define divergence; in fact, it is easier to say what it is not than what it is. For example, divergence is not synonymous with inter-disciplinarity, which emphasizes a sharing across established boundaries. Inter-disciplinarity seeks resemblances and shared methods and motivations, ignoring all the rest.

The search for sameness usually remains on the surface; it is unsustainable over a long- term and ultimately not very effective for investigating the breadth and depth of a discipline. Rather, from within architecture, the projects that follow choose to explore subjects, techniques, and methodologies that diverge, sometimes intentionally, sometimes organically, from the canon of research in architecture. In doing so, they expand the field of exploration and also point to how this canon, once privileged as a means of ordering and defining a distinct cultural and professional identity, may also have inadvertently reduced the subject’s active, living quality–architecture’s agency. These essays take architecture’s agency as primordial, with its variations, energies, and movements, and allow it to shape the course of their research program, their conclusions, and their speculations for the future of research in architecture.

Contact:
ConCave Ph.D. Student Group
+1 404-894-4885
concave@design.gatech.edu

Georgia Institute of Technology
School of Architecture
245 4th Street, NW, Suite 351
Atlanta, GA 30332