ABSTRACT
Continuity for the practice of architecture has been especially threatened for some decades. Even before digital disruption commenced in earnest in the 1990s, from the early 1980s project managers emerged from nowhere, unsettling the professional landscape. Beyond professional shifts through unexpected incursions and rivalries, architects need to get their heads around new and unfamiliar contexts and ways of thinking, such as 'big data', 'data analytics', 'parametricism' and 'digital fabrication'. Schools of architecture and practice are both inherently undertaking 'research through design' within the design studio. Some schools contrive to form a mutually supportive climate across the subdisciplines and link them profoundly to the design studio, but many fail to do so. Cohorts of embedded PhD candidates, once funded and installed, represent a serious alternative to the usual assortment of almost invisible postgraduates linked to full-time academics’ pet projects.
