Dissemination of architectural knowledge among research, training and practice

Abstract

Within the field of architecture, architects and scholars appear to have difficulty making sense of one another’s experience and the relationship between practice and research is often uneven and unclear. In addition, those who identify themselves as scholars of architecture tend to be closed in their academic spheres and vice versa for those who are practitioners. The professionals and scholars seem not to have adequate interchange and reconciliation of the profession. This has not helped much in developing a unifying framework for research and practice of architecture. The scholars and the practicing architect have yet to produce a comprehensive institutional framework capable of directing the profession toward the demonstrable improvement of the architectural practice; training and research. Survey is used as the research design. Questionnaires and interviews were used to collect data from archiects in practice and those in academia, students of architecture and educational administrators. The practicing architects were randomly sampled from the Board of Architects and Quantity Surveying (BORAQS) register. Forty practicing architects were selected. Twenty lecturers and fifty students were interviewed while four administrators were administered questionnaires. Qualitative techniques were used to analyze the responses from the field. This paper has unraveled the minimal relationship between scholars and professionals; the information flow between them and presented the way forward