Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design

184 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy

With the growing reliance on technology and other visual media to explore architec-
tural ideas, has architectural pedagogy realigned itself with the evolving possibilities
of the new technological age?
Second year students are balanced on a threshold where skills’ learning morphs
toward the creation of buildings, and further again toward the making of architecture.
Our ideas centred on each student’s acquisition of both a personal visual language and
an individual intellectual framework, while connecting them to a historical culture and
demonstrating the possibilities opened through experimental working method.
How can one engage students in the creation of a deep and broad body of knowl-
edge and combine the possibilities of the new technologies available and also draw
on a sound historical framework to deepen knowledge?
Using the existing stage two teaching frameworks – a traditional, well tried and
tested series of programmes with a weighting on manually made drawings, as our
context, we devised a new series of programmes which would encourage students to
be more explorative in their investigations; while embedding these pieces in a series
of ‘events’ with which the student would become intimately involved. All this aligned
with the possibilities that technology can now offer.

“There is no architecture without action, no architecture without event, no architecture
without programme. Actions qualify spaces as much as spaces qualify actions; that space
and action are inseparable and that no proper interpretation of architecture, drawing,
or notation can refuse to consider this fact”
Bernard Tschumi

Through this postulation a series of four programmes emerged that would run con-
secutively, each one informing the next, with the broadening knowledge base being
cumulative. The premise for the programmes is that architecture is embodied and
experimental, and activity that the building hosts is more relevant to the creation of
that Architecture than the form given to the containers for activity.
The new programmes were timetabled to run from week three of term one through
to the end of term two. It was proposed that the programme would consist of two
strands. The first would concern itself with research, the acquisition of a visual lan-
guage, and required the students to engage with three different mediums which we
titled – Cubist space, Film Space and Digital Space. Each investigation would take
between 2 – 3 weeks, with tutorials and reviews occurring regularly throughout the
programmes. The second strand was the implementation of the acquired knowledge
base, where the students were asked to design a building inspired and developed
through their investigations. This element would last the full 10 weeks of term and
encompass site visits and analysis, design development and completion, detailed
design investigations; with structure and construction being addressed; and include
tutorials, formal group discussions, peer reviews, interim and final and reviews.
The series of programmes began with the students being asked to select an activity.
We were as non prescriptive as possible, and encouraged the selection to be on a sub-
ject that they were interested in, even if they were not currently active participants.
The ‘rules’ for selection were that the activity should involve physical movement of
the participants, should involve a group of around 10 people, and be available to be