Transdisciplinarity and New Paradigm Research

This chapter considers architecture as a discipline, the role of practice in its academic research, and its potentially transdisciplinary character. Developing an earlier study of theses, we differentiate the plane of traditional academic research from an additional dimension offered by practice. However, we note that generic forms of practice occur in all disciplines and so we further differentiate creative practice as a characteristic of architectural research. We identify a number of strategies adopted by architectural researchers through which they attempt to maintain a link between this novel creative practice and the underlying values of traditional academic research. These form bridging strategies, comparable with Haberli’s definition of interdisciplinary research in which the traditional boundaries persist. But we find in Gibbon’s definition of transdisciplinarity, a glimpse of what we have previously claimed to be a new paradigm in which there is no boundary between the concepts and the practices, and therefore no boundaries between traditional and non-traditional cultures of knowledge.