Archinect - Features

Doctor of Design Program Seeks to Transform Design Education in the 21st Century

2021-12-10T13:43:00-05:00

In November 2019, the University of Calgary's School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape (UCalgary SAPL) announced its new Doctor of Design (DDes) program targeted towards practicing architects, planners, and landscape architects looking to "leverage their existing expertise into new areas of innovation." While institutions within the United States offer such programs, UCalgary is the first to launch a DDes program in Canada. Currently, the program has two active DDes cohorts that began in 2020 and 2021 with a total of 16 candidates located in Canada, Nigeria, Nepal, and Saudi Arabia. To better understand the program Archinect connected with program critic Marcelo Stamm, Ph.D., and DDes candidate Barry Johns.

With applications currently open for UCalgary's third DDes cohort, Stamm and Johns offer valuable insight to help prospective applicants learn more about the program.

How to get a PhD in Architecture

2021-03-30T14:26:00-04:00

Whether you’re at a crossroad in your professional career as an architect or in the middle of your BArch or MArch with some doubts on whether you want to practice architecture, pursuing a doctoral program in architecture might be an opportunity to still be involved with the world of architecture albeit not by practicing professionally. Pursuing a PhD in Architecture can easily be seen as a career shift since the point of getting a degree in architecture is to become an architect, however, there is another side to architecture that is less concerned with creating buildings and more on research, a route that can be as important and fulfilling. Nowadays, this can come in different forms of non-professional degrees, one of which is a Doctor of Philosophy in Architecture. In this article, I hope to provide some insight to those who are interested in doing research work in architecture.

Fellow Fellows: Zachary Tate Porter

2018-01-11T12:40:00-05:00

Fellow Fellows is a series that focuses on the current eruption and trend of fellowships in academia today. These positions within the academic realm produce a fantastic blend of practice, research and design influence and traditionally within a tight time frame. Fellow Fellows sits down with these fellows and attempts to understand what these positions offer to both themselves and the discipline at large. Fellow Fellows is about bringing attention and inquiry to an otherwise maddening pace of refreshed academics while giving a broad view of the exceptional and breakthrough work being done in-between the newly minted graduate and the licensed associate.

This week we talk to Zachary Tate Porter. He is a historian, educator, and designer based in Los Angeles. He uses objects, images, and texts to explore the shifting conceptions of ground that undergird architectural production. Zachary Tate Porter was the 2015-2016 Design of Theory Fellow at SCI-Arc.