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 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