Architecture Research Collaborative (ARC)
ARC cuts across traditional groupings in architectural research, connecting researchers from a wide range of backgrounds to stimulate innovation and bear collectively on complex architectural questions.
The dynamic research environment fostered by Architecture Research Collaborative (ARC) cuts across conventional disciplinary divisions. We champion both particular specialisms and interdisciplinary working to tackle complex architectural questions.
ARC currently focuses on three multidisciplinary and interconnected research concerns:
- matter and ecologies
- processes and practices of architecture
- histories and cultures of the built environment
We are home to world-leading researchers and multi-million pound projects, building a culture of research collaboration that engages with the public, practitioners, industry, early career researchers and students.
We are diverse, inclusive, experimental, and engaging. Our scholars’ methods range across design research, artistic and professional practice, participatory action and temporary urbanism, engineering and construction, architectural history and theory, digital design, emergence and living systems, ethnography, cultural studies and urban studies.
We enable and disseminate architecture research through collective exhibitions, public events, and symposia. We also produce publications and engage in lively research-led teaching at all levels from undergraduate to PhD.
We recognise the unique research potential of creative practice, visual, and architectural methods. We celebrate experimental, speculative, and artefactual outputs as forms of research, in addition to argument, evidence, and data.
ARC hosts weekly research seminars in collaboration with the Global Urban Research Unit (GURU), and works together on research projects and postgraduate research supervision.
Within our university, members collaborate with other schools across the University's three academic faculties. They also work with our own interdisciplinary research institutes including:
- Institute for Creative Arts Practice (NICAP)
- Humanities Research Institute (NUHRI)
- Institute for Social Science (NISS)
ARC is home to the international journals arq: architectural research quarterly (Cambridge University Press) and Journal of Architecture (Taylor and Francis). These journals mirror ARC's commitment to multidisciplinary architectural research, drawing together peer-reviewed research that spans the discipline from professional practice, design and technology, to architectural history and theory.
