Description
The two graduate schools of the Faculty of Architecture at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics provide studies in the fields related to architecture and construction. One of the schools focuses on scientific research and leads to a PhD, the profile of the other one is more artistic providing a PhD-equivalent DLA degree. The students benefit from the strong, personal relation to their supervisors. Although the schools possess first-class international partners with long, ongoing collaborations the widely debated difficulties of postgraduate studies in architecture challenges them. Since the establishment of the graduate schools in 2000 the schools have managed to introduce good practices of postgraduate studies and interdisciplinary research based mainly on German, Swiss and American examples. Despite of the high reputation of Scandinavian architecture and education, the relations to that area are definitely weaker compared to the above mentioned areas. The main goal of the project is to change this situation and start collaboration with highly ranked universities in Norway. Beyond introducing the best practices of the prospective partners in the education, the schools also expect to start research collaborations leading to publications in prestigious international journals. The schools are deeply convinced that world-class results are based on interpersonal communication, thus the beneficiaries of the present project would be graduate students, as well as their professors and supervisors on both sides.
Summary of project results
The two graduate schools of the Faculty of Architecture at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics provide studies in the fields related to architecture and construction. One of our schools focuses on scientific research and leads to a PhD, the profile of the other one is more artistic providing a PhD-equivalent DLA degree. Our students benefit from the strong, personal relation to their supervisors. Although we possess first-class international partners with long, ongoing collaborations the widely debated difficulties of postgraduate studies in architecture challenges us. Since the establishment of the graduate schools in 2000 we managed to introduce good practices of postgraduate studies and interdisciplinary research based mainly on German, Swiss and American examples. Despite of the high reputation of Scandinavian architecture and education, our relations to that area are definitely weaker compared to the above mentioned areas. The main goal of our project was to change this situation and start collaboration with highly ranked universities in Norway, especially NTNU in Trondheim and University of Oslo, and also non-governmental research-organizations as the Oslo residence Simula Research Laboratory. Beyond introducing the best practices of our prospective partners in our education, we also expected to start research collaborations leading to publications in prestigious international journals. We are deeply convinced that world-class results are based on interpersonal communication, thus the beneficiaries of the present project were be graduate students (Ph.D and DLA), as well as their professors and supervisors on both sides. The above mentioned three institutions were entirely appropriate for creating research based collaborations. NTNU was the one which merged the different fields of architecture and construction that created a common platform for Ph.D and DLA related students, professors and supervisors at the same time. The bilateral inter-institutional agreement between NTNU and BME assessed a long-term ongoing common collaboration in the future. Simula Research Laboratory and the connections with University of Oslo merely based on preceding personal scientific relations therefore the relating mobility activity could directly impacted the research activity both of the professors and doctoral students. Altogether 25 training programme, 3 teaching activity, 3 job shadowing and 2 student mobility programme were accomplished.
Summary of bilateral results
Three partner institutions were involved in the project: NTNU Trondheim, University of Oslo, Simula Research Laboratory, Oslo. The Faculty’s main aim before searching partners concerning the EEA Grant was to find a highly ranked university which is comparable to the BME Faculty of Architecture in the teaching methodology. EEA Grant gave us possibility to form a bilateral agreement. After an intensive, scientifically established collaboration an important consequence that both institutions were declared the necessity of common cooperation in the future. One of the main achievements was a BME-NTNU international conference organized in Trondheim under the topic ‘research based design’. The conference was not only the first step to acquaint the highlighted research topics, but also a great opportunity to negotiate the further possibilities of research activities. We started collaboration with prof. Snorre Christiansen at the Department of Mathematics, Oslo University (UiO). Prof. Christiansen is world-widely recognized in the field of numerical partial differential equationsn and holder of the Stephen Smale Prize. During the mobility period he visited BME and presented his results in a talk at the Miklós Farkas Applied Analysis Seminar. From the Hungarian side Gábor Domokos and András Sipos visited UiO and gave talks there. The talk by professor Domokos is available at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRrbFUNuewo. The collaboration is hoped to be continue in some of the projects of the MTA-BME Morphodynamics Research Group. FEniCS is an open source finite element software developed partly at the Simula Research Laboratory, Oslo. FEniCS has a great community, in which both contributions of developers and applications of users are welcome. To join the community and establish further cooperation we attended the FEniCS Workshop'16 at Simula where we were able to acquire a deeper understanding of the software and Eszter Fehér presented our results. We introduced our open source continuation algorithm for PDE-s based on FEniCS. We demonstrated the capabilities of the code by simulating wrinkling patterns of thin films. Visiting Simula for 6 weeks helped us to further extend our algorithm to be able to simulate the wrinkling of 2D surfaces immersed in 3D. Simula provided help with the implementation and the mathematical background. Apparently, we learned about other applications in the field of biomechanics by attending presentations.