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
Citation
Africa habita reviewPublisher
Department of Architecture and Building Science, University of Nairobi.