About ArchiDOCT

ArchiDoct was established in July 2013. ArchiDOCT is a biannual open access peer-reviewed journal dedicated to ongoing or recently completed doctoral research in architecture. Since its foundation from the European Network of Heads of Schools of Architecture -- an EU funded Network in the framework of the Lifelong Learning Programme-- ArchiDOCT has currently completed 9 years of operation with 16 successful issues and the 17th issue underway.

Higher Education has dramatically changed in the past two decades. This transformation’s repercussions have also impacted doctoral studies. While the two-cycle education of undergraduate and graduate levels has been relatively streamlined in terms of standards and expectations, doctoral education is still driven by disparate research cultures and local academic traditions. The global picture is not dissimilar: three letters (PhD), standing for Philosophiae Doctor, can bear several meanings in various contexts, especially in the domain of architecture. The changes that are nowadays taking place in architectural education and professional practice are significantly impacting innovation and new architectural knowledge generation and transfer.

Schools of architecture variously respond to these shifts by reforming their doctoral education strategies, structures and processes in order to have a more impactful contribution to architectural research. With a focus on doctoral research ArchiDOCT aspires to offer a forum for recording and building common grounds under this methodological and thematic polyphony.

One of the journal’s key aims is to challenge the confinement of doctoral-level knowledge production within institutional bounds, often under the pretext of intellectual property protection. Moving beyond such confinements can open productive paths toward the enhancement and crosspollination of research in architecture within a broader global network of researchers. Our goal is to create a platform for doctoral researchers’ progress, topic definition, methodological approach, validity, generalisability of findings, originality and contribution to knowledge. We are convinced that this platform will also make more visible a landscape of ongoing reforms to various institutions’ doctoral education strategies, structures and processes that shape changing definitions of architectural research and architectural researchers. One of ArchiDOCT’s most original features is its commitment to acting as a mentoring, educational tool that aims at improving and enhancing the writing skills of the authors, through the thorough work undertaken by its committed peer-reviewers.

Within this framework, ArchiDOCT invites contributions based on the broader domain of architecture, and its affiliations with architectural design, the ethics, politics and aesthetics of architecture, building technology, computation, history, theory, arts, product design, conservation, landscape design, environmental design, urbanism, regional planning and town planning. Authors are required to be active doctoral students or to have completed their PhD by dissertation, by publication, or by design recently before submitting their article.

Researchers that undertake research-by-design can submit image-rich essays of their work. Each issue features five articles and a “good practice example” by an established scholar setting the stage for the journal’s theme. It is gratifying to note that in its first eight years of operation eighty now well-established researchers were first published with ArchiDoct.