Guest Editor: Joseph Bedford, Virginia Tech

 

What does the concept of the discipline mean today and what does it mean for architecture? How does it differ from concepts such as field, culture, education, subject, profession, or practice? What does the history of the concept tell us about its present? And what contemporary challenges press upon it and promise to shape its future?

A Latin term in its origin, the first meaning of discipline refers to education, instruction and teaching. Yet it was not until the 19^th century with the emergence of the modern research university that the concept was used to refer to research practices and bodies of knowledge. Today, “the disciplines” are organizational instruments that arrange research and teaching into departments, credentialing mechanisms, labor markets, and the categorization of books in libraries. A second meaning of discipline relates to authority, and to training that improves self-control. From the 13^th to the 18^th century, the concept moved from a pedagogical context to a religious context, in which it referred to punishment which aimed to correct behavior, to a military context, to the penal system, giving us our common usage of the verb “to discipline.”

The discipline of architecture has a similar history. Vitruvius used the concept to speak to the parts of the overall body of knowledge architects needed to have. In the centuries in which architectural theorists emulated Vitruvius’s treatise, this body of knowledge was further refined and debated, with a consistent understanding that knowledge would improve practice. As architecture found itself within the post-war research university, its educators were called upon to clarify that knowledge, at first systematically as a science and after the critical events of the 1960s, as a humanities field as well.

In the last half-century, the idea of the discipline of architecture was given a more specific meaning as a body of knowledge about architecture itself that was not reducible to the way architecture is understood in the domains of the professional environment and the commercial marketplace. University-based research lent to architecture the notion that its discipline was distinct and autonomous from practice such that the notion became tied to a new neo-avant-garde sensibility during the 1970s and to an idea of autonomy as a means of critique.

Today, when claims to knowledge are cast under a pall of suspicion and assumed to be little more than proxies for power, when forms of artificial intelligence are questioning who the agents that create and manage knowledge are, when the institutional structures that have bolstered disciplines in the university are weakening under various populist and neoliberal attacks upon the university, and when forms of social media are changing the nature of the communication networks by which knowledge is cultivated and shared, it is ever more necessary to reflect on our understanding of what the discipline of architecture is, what makes it distinctive, how it is formulated, how its boundaries are understood, and what the avant-garde and critical potential is of its autonomy.

This issue of Khōrein on the concept of the discipline invites contributions that both philosophize and historicize the idea of architecture as a discipline. It seeks to solicit fresh historical and philosophical reflections on such topics as: the nature of the boundary between profession and discipline, theory and practice, science and the humanities, generalists and specialists; the sociology of architectural knowledge today; what kinds of practices—such as research, judgment, critique and design—are necessary for discipline-building; how algorithms and LLMs are transforming the nature of the discipline; how the discipline does, or should, serve contemporary design and practice; and how the discipline of architecture today relates to notions of autonomy, critique, and the avant-garde.

 

Submissions should be emailed to khorein@ifdt.bg.ac.rs.

Submission deadline: September 01, 2026