From the second half of the 20 th century onwards, Spanish rural architecture has suffered a transformation regarding its farming and ranching model. The economic unsustainability of the family economy has led to further action for the viability of the system. This transformation has meant a new mindset to the owner of the farm and livestock, who had to consider whether continuity was given to the exploitation or the countryside/field was changed and adapted to a new use such as rural tourism, restoration, or for collective uses such as holiday camps, cultural centers or others. Owners who have decided to continue the exploitation they were developing have had to industrialize it and thus extend it in a considerable percentage. That has meant the need to intervene significantly in the rural architectural heritage. A wide and varied range of results has been obtained in these interventions: from the fossilization or destruction of assets, to the achievement of harmony and coexistence between tradition and modernity in this heritage, the result of which represents the contemporaneity of rural architecture.
This article highlights the problem of scientific research in the field of architecture discipline and takes Algerian universities as a study case. It presents and discusses research paradigm problems in academic architecture research and aims to perform a content analysis of architecture, urbanism, and built environment doctoral theses submitted in different architectural departments. Understanding and correctly applying a research paradigm is of capital importance in any research. It guides the research by controlling its evolution and the relevance and coherence of the research approach. Above all, paradigmatic positioning allows the establishment of research validity and legitimacy. So, this article aims to analyze the main paradigms of research and their respective philosophical principles, to understand the methodological problem of research paradigm identification and its crucial role in scientific research regarding architecture, urbanism, and built environment in Algerian universities. Therefore, several doctoral theses in various specialities in architecture and urbanism were analyzed to determine their research paradigm and whether the ontological, epistemological, and methodological points of view were respected according to the logic of every paradigm. The article stresses the importance of reviewing some traditional models of knowledge that still dominate, in an erratic way, the world of scientific research in the field of architecture and urbanism. The article showed that research paradigms are not identified and clarified, and a big part of the selected theses do not respect research standards in each paradigm philosophy.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.