308 Doctoral Degree Program [Ph.D.] ADVANCED"
DOCTORAL DEGREE For many years, scholarship in Penn’s Ph.D. Program has operated under a double constraint: the development of knowledge that is both descriptive and productive. Although dedication to productive knowledge may not be common in other fields, it is entirely relevant to architecture. Marx’s dream for philosophy—to change, not merely interpret the world—is nothing special in architecture; rather, it is a fairly obvious commonplace. Architecture is a form of engagement par excellence, aimless if not oriented toward given conditions, intent on their transformation. The particularity of architecture’s productive sort of knowledge, that it gets its hands dirty in the actual transformation of the environment in which we live, has been and remains a central concern of Penn’s architectural scholarship. Dedication to both descriptive and productive knowledge may be apparent in the titles of some of the books published by Ph.D. graduates. Among the recent books are: Jin Baek, Nothingness: Tadao Ando’s Christian Sacred Space; Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto, Medici Gardens: From Making to Design; Thomas Beck, La Villa; Nathaniel Coleman, Utopias and Architecture; George Dodds, Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion; David Haney, When Modern Was Green: Life and Work of Leberecht Migge; Zhongjie Lin: Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement in Japan; Alex Anderson, Modern Architecture and the Commonplace; Claudio Sgarbi, Vitruvio ferrarese De Architectura, la prima versione illustrate; William Braham, Modern Color/ Modern Architecture; Judith Major, To Live in the New World: A.J. Downing and American Landscape Gardening; Harry Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper: Architect of the Nineteenth Century; Gevork Hartoonian, Ontology of Construction; and Cornelis van de Ven, Space in Architecture. These books clarify developments in a number of periods and investigate a range of subjects related to architecture, landscape architecture, building technology, and urbanism. Concepts are examined— space, style, or surface color, for example— but also particular figures: Le Corbusier, A.J. Downing, Gottfried Semper, and Mies van der Rohe. This range indicates the real possibility of striking a balance between architecture’s disciplinary identity, ultimately based in practice, and its engagements with several subjects and dimensions of scholarship in the university at large. Yet more than balance is at issue here, for we have learned that neither scholarship nor practice in architecture can be realized fully without reference to the other, that neither drawing nor writing can realize its potential when pursued in isolation. In reciprocity, though, they can help us know the world by productively engaging in its transformation.