Research Priority Areas
The Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, College of Engineering at Qatar University has experienced faculty members and active researchers, who combine distinguished teaching experience and a substantial record of research outputs and publications in established academic international journals.
Our research strategy, themes, and topics are founded on critical issues for academic research and reflect recent regional discourses about architecture and urbanism.
Our research is aimed at contributing to the advancement of knowledge that informs architectural and design practices, that contributes to the creation of livable environments, and that reflects an ethical responsibility toward the environment, culture, and society.
We look at research within two perspectives; a) research that seeks to understand the future through a better understanding of the past, i.e., research that tests accepted ideas, and b) research that probes new ideas and concepts that will shape the future, i.e., research that develops new visions and conceptual understandings. Therefore, our research focus is wide in scope and addresses a spectrum of issues that are technically oriented, conceptually focused, and/or philosophically and historically driven in the field.
Architecture and Urban Planning Research Theme
Sustainable and Livable Environments
Our theme addresses sustainability as it relates to the built environment in its entire range; be it physical, economical, and/or socio-cultural. The goal is to contribute to the advancement of knowledge by developing research findings based on both conceptual and empirical approaches to the built environment.
Issues also addressed in our research involve the development of tools for analyzing, designing, assessing, and delivering sustainable and livable environments at different scales, ranging from interior spaces and near environments to exterior spaces, landscape architecture, and urban public spaces. Our research activities take place within three research clusters (Living Architecture and Urban Environment, Building Technology and its Application, Cultural Heritage in the Built Environment underlying the following topics.
Human-Environment Interaction: This area involves the development and implementation of tools that aim at sensitizing building users to better understand sustainability. The aim is to conceive bottom-up collaborative strategies involving users for assessing their existing environments and/or participating in the design of new environments. School buildings, workplaces, and small-scale housing projects are targeted building types.
Education: This area involves the development of research relating to the ways in which sustainability is addressed in built environment education. It involves surveys of architecture schools, observation studies, and content analysis. It also explores the study and analysis of new research and taught programs within the region/worldwide that have strong sustainable design and construction components. Exploring, developing, and investigating design studio teaching practices that have the capacity to address regional sustainability is one of the priorities underlying this area.
Assessment: This area involves evaluation of buildings that have received recognition/merits/awards for materializing sustainable design and construction aspects into responsive built environments. The purpose is to analyse and diagnose best practices, impact of one sustainable design aspect over others, and shortcomings or deficiencies including post-occupancy evaluations.
Practice/Project Delivery: This area involves developing a comprehensive understanding about how sustainable buildings and urban environments are delivered. It investigates the way in which sustainability imperatives and guidance documents influence professional design and construction practices. This includes comparisons of sustainable design and construction guidance documents while exploring how professionals believe their time and effort should best be invested over the various phases of delivery of a project from inception through briefing to commissioning and occupancy.
Building and Urban Conservation: This area involves investigating how historic buildings or urban environments are readapted for new uses and functions. It explores recent practices in remodeling, upgrading, renovation, and adaptive reuse of historical buildings including whether or not these practices respect the historical design and structure, its immediate urban fabric, environmental aspects, and their impact on socio-cultural sustainability.
Energy Efficiency and Building Design: Energy used in buildings in the Gulf region and Qatar is accounts for up to 60% of all usage. This includes air conditioning, ventilation, and lighting. Most of the decisions for building design are made at the early stages of the design process. This area of research aims at exploring ways of reducing energy consumption of residential environments through the effective use of passive strategies.
Technology: This area investigates new technologies and building systems and how they are integrated into sustainable buildings. It includes studies of lighting, materials, waste, energy conservation strategies, and computer technologies. The impact of these aspects on the environment and building occupants would be the basis for exploring these aspects.
Form and Typological Studies: This area covers the investigation of formal configuration of buildings as they relate to the urban context. It addresses fundamental architectural questions related to the notion of types and patterns, figurative and formal aspects of buildings, and typological processes. Topics in this area include surveys, documentation, and typological studies of historical architecture and contemporary urbanism.
Urban Regeneration and Community Development: This area aims at investigating issues to improve living standards of urban communities and reduce social and economic inequalities. Research in this area aims at better understanding the systematic impacts of urban policies on the design of new projects, which target better service delivery to urban dwellers.
Metropolitan Urban Policy: This area covers issues pertaining to deindustrialization, economic globalization, and multiculturalism in modern society. Research in this area covers explorations and development of resilient and sustainable urban policies and underlying topics of eco-zones, districts, and civic ecologies.
