Enriching Architectural Scholarship by Building on Boyer

Written for a conference session titled “How Do We Define Architectural Research Today?” scheduled for the 103rd Annual Meeting of the ACSA, this paper takes a simple position: we do not define architectural research, assuming we refers to architects or other designers. Instead, many architecture faculty and other designers are forced to shoehorn their scholarly activities into a system created by and intended for scientists, liberal arts scholars, and other non-designers.This paper proposes a broader understanding of scholarship by summarizing Ernest L. Boyer’s seminal 1990 report Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, examining the reaction to Boyer’s report, and proposing an expansion of Boyer’s four categories of scholarship by adding three new categories: the scholarship of design, the scholarship of reporting, and the scholarship of speculation. Each of these new categories of scholarship has important implications for architectural scholars. This paper concludes by arguing that having appropriate standards in place at the departmental level is a good first step, but for architectural scholars to reach full recognition, faculty must work to address university-level biases.

Volume Editors
David Ruy & Lola Sheppard

ISBN
978-0-935502-95-4