The inconceivable agenda Wouter Davidts, Maarten Delbeke, Johan Lagae, Andrew Leach Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Ghent University. Belgium While the ‘unthinkable doctorate’ conference aimed at forming the ground for an inquiry that is at once legitimate, necessary and important, its premises, as articulated in the call for papers (see above: Introduction), failed to grasp the conceptual (and institutional, and historical) foundations of what its organisers considered to be ‘the current lack’ by posing this question through a rhetoric of ‘inconceivability’. In a direct response to the conference call, this essay argues that the classical separation of architectural science from architectural practice is all but productive as a starting point for rethinking and broadening the scope of the doctorate as a degree and as an academic process. Surpassing discursive and insti- tutional frameworks upholding and consolidating the seemingly immutable division between architectural practice and the intellectualisation of architecture, we propose to position the doctorate as an investigatory ‘project’ implicating in equal measure both the university and the profession. ‘Thinking’ of ‘scientific work in architecture’ as a genuine architectural enterprise, we consider the doctorate as an institutionally authorised chal- lenge to the disciplinary bases and techniques of architecture itself, that mobilises both theory and practice, however specific or traditional the individual project. The role of the doctorate is thus not simply to test the limits of architectural knowledge, but also the aca- demic tools and media addressing that corpus. In posing the question of the ‘unthinkable doctorate,’ the NeTHCA conference advanced a straightforward agenda: to recognise the intellectual and practical work of architectural practice as a valid format for doctoral study. It started from the conviction that the work of architectural practitioners is at least as rigorous, if not more perceptive on ‘architectural’ matters than the scientific models that presently dominate this level of study. Many doctorates ‘run the risk of “advancing” a “science” without a clear mandate, a blind encyclopaedic enterprise whose only purpose is the accumulation of undifferentiated information.’ Or so the call for papers would have had us believe: this document represented much current doctoral work as being somewhat ‘useful’, but ultimately as advancing merely an ‘orphaned, deracinated science, without stimulating any progress in terms of knowledge.’ Many doctorates apparently regarded architecture as an ‘object of investigation’, something to ‘know’ or study without truly under- standing ‘its structures and determinations.’ Those doctoral projects that ‘think through and reflect upon (...) architecture qua architecture in its various fields of operation, its possible essence or existence’ were rarely, if ever, it was claimed, produced within the traditional habitat of the doctorate: academia. In direct response to the conference’s call for papers, this essay’s sole aim is to lay bare its explicit 353 The Journal of Architecture Volume 11 Number 3 # 2006 The Journal of Architecture 1360–2365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360600931326