Andjelkovic, K.: “Pedagogical modalities in teaching 1st year design in architecture: towards cinematic design practice”, at the International Conference “Initiations: Practicing of Teaching 1st Year Design in Architecture” 23-25 October 2019, University of Cyprus. (original) (raw)
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2001
This book holds together the proceedings of a three day international conference on architectural education that took place at the University of Cyprus, in Nicosia, between 23-25 October 2019. The conference focused on first year design teaching and the broad theme under examination was how we introduce students in the world of architectural design. Entering the field of architecture often, still, holds something from the tradition of the master-apprentice model of education or training, despite the fact that the medieval craft guilds may have long been gone. Relics of this tradition can be traced, in the implicit principles of the various schools of architecture, which are usually not addressed explicitly in the curriculum or design briefs of their studios. The purpose of this conference was to present, expose, map and critically discuss the methods and norms, symbols and narratives, customs and dispositions of current practices of first year design teaching, through the term ‘initiation.’ ‘Initiation’ can be understood, first of all, in a temporal basis, specifying that the conference was focusing on the challenge of teaching design at the very beginning of architectural education. At the same time, though, the term was selected because of its rich social or political connotations, as involving some sort of ritual or rite of passage that allows someone to enter a group. The discussions that took place during the conference, as well as, the papers that are been published here, have taken different stances in relation to these two readings. The interpretative framework of each stance has ideological implications, exposing a series of other positionings regarding not only architectural pedagogy, but also the very nature of architecture. Moreover, initiation in the field of architecture through the first year of education was found to be important since it has the power to be quite formative in shaping the future professional architect. The conference revealed that multiple pedagogical approaches coexist, each prioritizing certain values over others, often driven by a different understanding of what the role of the profession of the architect is or should be in society. It thus seems inevitable that any discussion on educational agendas should also discuss the role of the architectural profession, especially now that professional boundaries are reassessed, diluted or even dissolved. Initiating students in first year design studio is a pedagogical experiment that sets up the fundamentals of architectural education: the ethos, creative energy, drawing and making skills, curiosity in exploring and developing ideas, understanding context and how architecture frames ways of living. In this sense, teaching first year architectural design is many things at the same time: a huge responsibility, an arduous process, a joy. And while there may be many paths to choose as a studio instructor, one specific pedagogical approach is chosen each time.
IN THE BEGINNING WERE BUILDINGS: The Radical Idea of Learning Architecture by Designing It
Curricular answers to the questions, "What is fundamental to design?" and 'What must be taught first now?" frame what students perceive as the core of their discipline and generate different student products and learning outcomes. The meth-ods students learn in the beginning set in motion ways of work-ing that can be more—or less—easily built on by future courses and instructors. This paper tells the story of experiments in beginning design education for 3.5-year Master of Architecture (March-3) stu-dents. We examined the aforementioned questions for these students without prior architectural education. In the fragment-ed post-modern theoretical landscape of architecture schools, having faculty members align on these questions allows pro-gressional logics. In the absence of a shared framework, stu-dents attempt to construct their own knowledge systems to integrate the multiple instructors' points of view. The essence of our work was to frame six essential lines of knowledge devel-opment in building the consciousness of an architect and to identify the fundamental level (1:) of knowledge and skills for each. By this we arrive at a low complexity, level 1 to level 1 correspondence among all six related and co-defining but irre-ducible knowledge lines—yielding beginnings that are in no way proto-architecture, but rather, buildings. Developing complexity stands in stark contrast to a common pedagogy found in our school and (with variations) in many others, focused on: 1) A single spatial-formal line of develop-ment; 2) Pre-architectural abstract composition; and 3) An addi-tive process of sequentially increasing form-driving issues over long time periods. Instead, in starting our compressed graduate program, we found success in an integrated beginning studio curriculum, teaching students to design buildings, ad-dressing at a beginning level: 1) site and context, 2) program and use, 3) form and space, 4) human experience and feeling, 5) architectural ideas and meaning, and 6) building technology. Beginning design becomes a curriculum of multiple relation-ships at 1:1, that is, among the first level of each line.
Experimentation, Prototyping and Digital Technologies towards 1:1 in architectural education
JIDA
Within education, and in relation to the physical-digital dialogue, we can observe the emergence of new tools, or tool sets, that facilitate experimentation in architectural education, among these, the Fab Lab movement, where 1:1 scale prototyping in construction become more accessible. The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, considered the frontrunners in the integration of this mission within their architectural and construction based educational programs, bring materialising design to the centre of their educational methodology. Based on this, IAAC educational programs explore and produce a large series of experiments and prototypes, aiming to propose a different paradigm to the current productive system. This paper analyses series of projects co-developed by students, staff and industry collaborators with this aim. Through a design/build methodology the paper exhibits the importance of this approach to not only envision the future habitat of our society, but also to build it in the present.
Prototypes in Architectural Education: As Instruments of Integration in the Digital Era
METU JFA, 2007
Architectural design and education today has a strong new focus on process, material and data organizations with the conceptual background of emergence and complexity of the digital era. In this paper, we reevaluate the design as research, and distinguish the digital and conceptual modes of prototypes in dialogue with the material prototypes. Through four instances in our current educational experience, we review this dialogue and the field of potentialities that exist in the interrelation of the different modes of prototypes. Contemporary design entails relational thinking, computational and systemic methodology and thus operates within the continuous feedback between the digital and the material. DESIGN AS RESEARCH Thinking of the design domain in the context of ideas and technology of its day is essential to grasp its changing dynamics. For examples of design as research, we look into the works of Kepes, da Vinci, Gaudi, Otto and Koman, who experimented with series of novel techniques. Their work has enhanced design knowledge and is not limited to only one specific domain. In all areas of design, research is found in the form of experimentation and technology-sharing, as the way to integrate design knowledge to the concepts of its time. Gyorgy Kepes, founder of the Centre for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT, dedicated it to creative collaboration between artists and scientists. For years, researchers at CAVS have pioneered the use of technologies such as lasers, plasma sculptures, sky art and holography as tools of expression in public and environmental art. The work in these studios, together with his own work, relied on experiments that are posed between art and design (Figure 1)(1). Da Vinci's holistic approach to design in 1500s directs research towards various realms; human and animal anatomy, natural phenomena such as branching of trees, water flows, flying of birds, sound waves and music
Visual Tools as Enhancers to a Creative Building Process with the Community- A New Visual Live Architectural Education Approach, 2014
Theoretical university methods of teaching has created a gap between architecture students and educators, architecture students and their career, architecture students and themselves, and last but not least architecture students and the community/user. Upon my research and explorations, I have created a new visual ‘live’ educational approach in architecture that relies on visual motivation and hands on live events. This new visual approach has a magical impact of enabling the educator to reach into each student on an individual level and dig out his/her personal potentials. It also creates a powerful mutual language, and creates creative synergy between architecture students/educators/and the community. This approach is built on the hypothesis I have tackled in my PhD, that when a common visual language is created and through a simple design/build event and educational process in the outproduct has a magical and much deeper value. In this process the architecture students act as the motivators and the community are doers and thinkers. The process starts with a series of visual exercises that help break the gap between the educator and his/her students. Once this gap has been broken, magical changes happen in both the educator and the architecture students. Through a set of visual exercises to promote creative abilities based on diverse theories, research and explorations on creativity and visualization, the architecture students have their visual and creative abilities boosted, using variant flexible free visual tools. The exercises rely to an extent on visual techniques of psychoanalysis of each character, to be able to reach their internal soul and inner eye and release the subconscious reticular system. Exercise provoke abstract free flexible thinking based on scientific theories and personal explorations, passing gradually through the different needs if the different phase of creativity (preparation, incubation, illumination, and finalization). This process will integrate all sensors, external socio/physical environment, emotions and memory, all at the right time of the process. Using similar set of exercises the architecture students are to then explore boosting the visual and creative abilities of a core group from a community in an informal settlement. This helps them to share common visual understandings and language. Together, they are to perform a visual small event like renovation or design/built project, based on the community’s visualized ideas through a hands on process. The ‘live event like’ visual process provokes the best out of all participants and real sustainable changes happen in the socio/physical environment. The event helps the idea of exploring and learning ‘as it goes’. There is no rigid pre-design but the event and the visual impacts and feelings guide a creative everlasting educational experience, as commented by the students, community, and participating educators.
Teaching Architectural Design through Creative Practices
METU JFA I METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture, 2019
This article provides investigation details of teaching architectural design as a fundamental part of the architectural discipline. This line of research delves into learning about the most creative action of the architectural production process, design, taking into account that creativity must be complemented by disciplinary training that combines both theoretical knowledge and practical skills. Considering these observations, this text provides information about the experience accomplished by four teachers from the School of Architecture of the Universitat Politècnica de València (ETSA-UPV) on the subject of Design Studio 1 for the first-year studies. The propaedeutic character of this subject shows additional difficulties given the complexity of introducing the students into the field of architectural design. The article begins with a description of the historical background of teaching architecture, contextualizing the object of study and also the different processes used as reference during the accomplishment of the teaching experience. The second section includes a description of basic methodology of the specific case of the first-year subject taught in the ETSA-UPV. It provides analysis of its evolution, detection of the problems and suggested variations of the learning method in order to improve the final results. The canonical teaching method is based on a linear process starting with the theory, followed by architectural analysis, finishing with project synthesis, which generates important doubts for the first-year students when implementing the theory in the project phase. Therefore, resuming the cycle of circular learning studied by David Kolb, several creative practices have been introduced into the subject, where the order of the stages depends on the particular characteristics of each individual and learning takes place by combining practices of perception and comprehension. Keeping in mind the main goal of the new teaching approach, the third part of the text includes a description of several activities. They are designed using a methodology capable to promote the transfer of knowledge between the analysis phase and the project phase. Creative practices are based on the learning by doing process, where reflection, conceptualization and experimentation are carried out with two basic tools: hand drawing and the three-dimensional model. With the practices and these two manual tools we seek a triple objective for students: to acquire a greater creative capacity, to develop spatial vision and to recognize how materiality affects the definition and perception of space. The methodology of the practices includes thinking with the hands, folding the space, inhabiting the space and building the space, and it is compared to the results obtained during the academic year 2017-2018. Finally, these results, together with the surveys completed by the students, lead to following conclusions: introducing creative activities in the first year of architectural design has shown a substantial improvement of the work carried out by students and has allowed settling the acquired theoretical knowledge. It helps to understand it not only as concepts that can be observed and analysed in reality, but also as tools of the creative process itself. On the one hand, the construction of models supports intuitive learning, allowing the students to directly recognize the consequences of their actions during the constructive process and its implications in the final result. On the other hand, the activities developed using hand drawing techniques confirm the value of the drawn plans as a tool to define the results and verify their correctness. Experiencing architecture with the hands implicitly involves a work of reflection through which the students are able to understand that space is the actual key element of the architectural project.
Sketch-Computer-Imagination Reflections on Architecture EducationMethodology
2018
The article underlines the problem of introducing computer techniques into the education process in master degree studies in architecture. Following the consumer society, developing technologies, changing social values architecture education changed its continuous principle into two-level system. The system well known from other fields of education results in diversified level of knowledge between admitted students on master studies. This fact in together with large exercise groups and a relatively short time allocated with the project requires methodical approach in relationship between a student and a teacher. The article focuses on complexity of a design process within different stages. Special attention is placed to an early design phase of shaping an architecture form because it demands different ways of presentation including freehand sketching, physical modelling and digital modelling. These tools correspond to the subsequent three phases of the design process, starting with ...
2018
In the early years of their education, beginner design students simultaneously develop various perceptual and intellectual skills. Their learning goals in the first years are primarily focused on composition and basic design: to increase skill in recognizing perceptually what design elements they are seeing, and to understand how these elements come together in their ongoing compositions. As students improve in the hands-on activity of composing, learning goals begin to expand to include inquiries about process, creativity, imagination and style: to understand what it means to be creative in processes and products, to improve imagination in and through each design iteration, and to start developing individual style through understanding what resonates viscerally and intellectually with them.
A working draft on design education [Final]
Approaching architecture as social discourse, this essay forwards a meta‐model in critical context analysis for design education. Working within a social construction frame, I propose a dialogical investigation into the constitutive power of language, and discuss analytical processes in spatial communication, for first‐year students of architecture. As such, this essay organizes an expository sequence of classroom or design‐studio talks, diagrams, and commentary, compiled from several years of classroom experience. By this means, I model the critical processes that have most effectively helped students to self‐situate within the action of social and spatial context analysis. These processes, which employ critical dialogue and co‐constructed investigative research, engender modes of operation by which students may learn to qualify the products of their investigative and creative activities, and in turn, initiate new forms of those processes, practical and meaningful to them, throughout design school and career.