Invitational Reflective Practice stream

Reflective Practice staff and international visiting critics

Reflective Practice Postgraduate

Architecture gallery: Reflective Practice projects

About the Reflective Practice Stream

This is an invited postgraduate stream and research cluster focusing on reflective practice and practice-based research. Prof Leon van Schaik and his supervisory team seek out practitioners who have developed a body of work demonstrating mastery of their field, invite them to reflect upon the nature of that mastery within a critical framework, to speculate through design on the nature of their future-practice and to demonstrate their findings publicly. We argue that they have a responsibility to the furtherance of architecture, and that this examination of the nature of their mastery promotes and extends the knowledge base of the profession, and thus its ability to serve society.

The Invitational Master of Architecture (research by project) program has been expanded over the past five years through the introduction of the invitational PhD in Architecture (research by project) program, with participants who are in the main practitioner/academics who are undertaking practice and project-based research. There have been three successful Invitational Phd completions to date.

The Invitational Reflective Practice Stream is one strand in the largest Post Graduate Program in design in Australia, with in excess of 100 candidates at work at any given time. Other streams of research by project include Urban Design, focused on a mapping and propositional process developed at RMIT since 1987 and applied to date to Melbourne, Tokyo and Taipei; a similar Landscape Architecture program; a program that specialises in the exploration of spatiality and another that explores Industrial Design.

Since its inception, over sixty leading architects and a small but increasing number of practitioners in other allied fields have participated in the invitational program. The outcomes of candidates design research work is publically exhibited in commercial galleries as part of the examination process. Collections of invited candidate projects are published regularly in an ongoing series of document of record books through RMIT Press.

Prof. Leon van Schaik has published Mastering Architecture: Becoming a Creative Innovator in Practice, London: Wiley, 2004, documenting and situating the outcomes and aspirations of this program. He curated the exhibition Melbourne Masters Architecture, at the Tarrawarra Museum of Art in Victoria, 2004, as a related event.

Coordinator and Senior Supervisor:

Leon van Schaik - Innovation Professor of Architecture
Senior Supervisor, Invitational program

Postgraduate Supervisors:

Associate Professor Sand Helsel
Professor Peter Downton
Visiting Professor Paul Carter
Visiting Professor Ranulph Glanvile

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