Any design project should be a research project. Architecture is a complex discipline and the work done in PhD courses at the university should seek to close the gap between teachers, practitioners, and researchers, looking for new ways of improving the development in the field of “architecting”, that is to say doing architecture not just thinking about it.

The work presented in this publication tries to show an example of how a PhD research-project can be practical and how it can help to improve the professional work of the architect. The two projects presented in this paper will try to prove that doctoral work doesn’t have to be “narrowly professional", or “entirely academic”, it can be something in between. In the same way that this research encourages to break the boundaries between landscape and architecture, “Mode 1” (academic) and “Mode 2” (experimental) of research could be blended together in a new interstitial “Mode 3”, breaking this antagonistic binomial.