About

The Architecture Research Collaborative (ARC) comprises a diverse group of scholars whose work ranges across the key topics in contemporary international architecture and landscape research. Committed to both rigorous scholarship and the multidisciplinary approach demanded by the complexity of architectural research, ARC is structured through a dynamic and evolving pattern of research themes that cut across the conventional divisions of design, technology, and history and theory research.

As a group of researchers with a wide range of backgrounds including design practice, participatory action, engineering and construction, digital design and emergence, ethnography, architectural history and critical theory we recognize the opportunity that our specialisms can bring to shared problems and questions, and aim to stimulate innovation and foster connectivity between methodologies that are too often isolated from one another.

With the publication of Vol 18 in 2014, ARC will also be home to arq: architectural research quarterly, a very well-established and respected journal published by Cambridge University Press. Mirroring ARC’s commitment to multidisciplinary architectural research, arq is unique in its drawing together international peer-reviewed research on architecture from a full range of related disciplines including practice, design, technology, architectural history and theory and aiming to appeal to practice professionals as well as to academics. (Managing Editor: Adam Sharr, Editors: Sam Austin, Martyn Dade-Robertson, Katie Lloyd Thomas and Graham Farmer)

The collaborative is organized to respond to and support research across a number of common themes, that can change as our collective concerns shift. The themes currently running are:

  • Cultures and Transition
  • Futures, Values and Imaginaries
  • Mediated Environments
  • Research by Design
  • Social Justice, Wellbeing and Renewal
  • Specifications, Prescriptions and Translation

As will be evident these themes are also shaped in relation to the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape’s collective priorities – ‘Discourse, Power and Materiality’, ‘Environmental Futures’, ‘Cultures and Change’, ‘Social Justice, Wellbeing and Renewal’ and ‘Research by Design’.  Project research collaborations and co-supervision are common between members of ARC and the School's other research centre GURU - the Global Urban Research Unit.

For further information on ARC please contact co-directors Katie Lloyd Thomas or Martyn Dade-Robertson.

 

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