Roles and Challenges of the Hybrid Practitioner

The chapters in this book developed out of an online symposium called The Practice of Architectural Research (8–10 October 2020), which examined a research field that operates between design practice and the formation of theory and history. As a consequence, it also explored – though largely implicitly – the character and legitimacy of the linking figure: the hybrid practitioner, who combines one or more academic or creative roles and activities. The special condition of hybridity as it came to the fore in the symposium dialogues is addressed in this text. While the many abstract submissions demonstrated a general interest in the theme, the symposium itself revealed a diversity in types of researchers. Even though most of the participants shared an education in an architecture school, individual career paths had subsequently diverged sig¬nificantly. These range from academics with full time university careers, and architects writing and teaching while running an architectural office, to the majority operating somewhere in between. Together their variegated papers and presentations constituted a rich and divergent range of stances within, and reflections on, the field of “the hybrid practice.”