PHD CULT - F.J. Maroto y S. Martín Blas (eds.); DPA ETSAM

Current doctoral research work at UPM’s Advanced Architectural Design PhD program presents an extraordinarily diverse and apparently contradictory panorama: with technical, historical, philosophical, and artistic approaches, it encompasses from building detail to geographical scale; from theory to criticism, pedagogy, professional practice or social practices; from the confident appeal to the masters, types and elements settled by History, to a visionary fascination for the instability of an unprecedented present and future, driven by media exposure, new technologies, and by climatic, atmospheric, and demographic omens. Everything seems to fit into a program which is exceptional both in terms of its size, with more than a hundred students and more than fifty supervisors, as well as for the breadth of its research field, on occasions difficult to sort among the established categories and structures of academic research.

In this book, the collection of disparate research texts related to the Advanced Architectural Design PhD program performs as a kind of assemblage, a technique inherent to architecture and urbanism. Its editing has involved the identification of affinities among its separate parts as well as their coalescence as a whole. A condensed format is used for the articles written by PhD students, which are instances of the scientific production that is being carried out at the time of this publication. In them, the topics and the hypotheses of ongoing research are exposed. These texts are complemented with additional writings by professors and doctorates who have participated in the program as readers and reviewers of the thesis work.