The untimely death of Professor Jonathan Hill in late 2023 has prompted us to reflect on the complex nature of legacy – how it relates to the building of a life, and the building of an institution. What has become clear in the ensuing months, as the School community struggles to come to terms with this loss, is the profound asymmetry between the quietness of Jonathan’s demeanour, and the magnitude of his impact. His absence is felt widely and deeply. Here, as a modest opening, we reflect briefly on what this means for the PhD programme.

Jonathan’s contribution to The Bartlett School of Architecture is immeasurable, but his legacy is a material fact for doctoral students. As the first graduate of the Architectural Design PhD programme, and later having been its director for over 20 years, Jonathan was in many ways the embodiment of the programme. And yet he always emphasised how closely linked the Architectural Design and Architectural History and Theory programmes were, enacting this in a series of jointly organised seminars and events, such as the Research Conversations and the annual PhD Conference. Moreover, he was always a supporter of wider collaboration within The Bartlett and across departments at UCL. The inclusion of work in this year’s catalogue from students in the Architecture and Digital Theory programme, and the Bartlett Development Planning Unit is an ongoing reflection of this.

The immense variety of topics, methodologies, historical periods and cultural contexts assembled in this catalogue also illustrates the interdisciplinarity that Jonathan strongly advocated for in his ‘Design Research: The Next 500 Years’ article (2022), presented in this publication in an abbreviated version. In the text, which chronicles the origins of the PhD in Architectural Design programme, he argues that by opening architecture up to dialogue with other disciplines and, above all, by incorporating other methods and media, the student is confronted with important questions of authorship and positionality in relation to the research process and the architectural practice itself. Beyond simply offering a path to intellectual enrichment, interdisciplinarity becomes an incisive tool for critical thinking precisely through the friction generated by asking questions in a different context.

A commitment to the plurality of ideas and an ardent resistance to defining any one model of research is not restricted to the doctoral level; it can be clearly observed across different programmes at The Bartlett, at the undergraduate and master’s levels. Much has changed in architectural education in the 30 years since the programme’s inception, and important, necessary work is being done to reconcile a complex institutional past. In meeting these challenges, it may still be worth considering that what allowed for such a radical pedagogical experiment – a PhD by design – to flourish in the first place was a culture of possibility.