We invite teachers, researchers and architects interested in “teaching through design” to propose a paper for one of the four themes of the colloquium. Selected abstracts will be published in the proceedings of the colloquium. From this group, eight participants will be selected to perform a communication in the sessions of the colloquium. Papers can be submitted in English or in Portuguese.
Each author can only submit an abstract in accordance with the form.
Extended deadline for submissions
Submit abstracts on the website form (link) until 4th July 2012.
The results will be communicated by 15th July 20th July. On this date will also be given the proposals selected for communication
1. Programs and Themes
Design is a main goal in architectural education. Through Design Studio exercises students simulate the professional practice in an academic milieu. In order to acquire architectural professional skills, Design Studios are a central learning to practice. However, that practice is also a reflection on the program and project theme, due to the Design Studio’s precise answer to a more general problem or need. The acquired skills, the “how to do” of design learning, should not obliterate the reflection on “why” and “what to do”, and that is precisely the aim of program exercises and themes. Only through this “reflection on action” will students get a balanced education in the architecture bachelor degree.
2. Design Instruments and Composition
Drawing is an instrument for Design; however, to architecture education this instrument is not an end in itself. This means that the final aim in drawing is just to accomplish a specific design purpose. Moreover, at least since the Renaissance, drawing is the main instrument for architectural conception and representation, and from an educational point of view, drawing emulates the building act.
This mediated condition of drawing (mediation for a design proposal, its representation as well as its communication) shouldn’t avoid the need for a strong investment on its instrumental acquisition for students. And that’s not only because there is a need that drawings should translate properly the design purpose, but also because through drawing students get specific skills of observation, notions of scale, and the reason for things as they are (“la raison d’être”). Through drawing students get acquainted with an instrument that allows a step-by-step approach to a design result.
3. Design as a Synthesis: cross-referencing Disciplines
Architectural design is a space for confluence, and the white sheet of paper where architectural design takes place is a support for that confluence. The increasing complexity of architectural design implies the crisscrossing of several different perspectives over the design action. The architect’s point of view when starting a design proposal is always disciplinary, which means that it starts from an idea that comes from architecture as a discipline: a compositional idea, or the definition of a set of rules that define a self-disciplined game.
An architecture student, at least in bachelor degree, doesn’t have an overall view of all the implications that his or her design should be aware of. What can be taught at an architecture school are the instruments to deal with the design problem, and also the strategies do deal with problems of increasing complexity. So, how can design synthesis be taught? How to teach the characteristic synthesis of an architectural project? What’s the role of complementary disciplines in the learning design process?
4. Research by design
It is quite common that design studio teachers refer to their own project practice as research. In fact research is the most important element for design studio courses: first of all because there is not yet an objective meaning for research in design studio, or everything, in a way, is research; conversely, nothing is yet research, as that relationship is not yet clarified.
That’s why a debate about strategies for teaching and learning architecture is so important mainly in master degree. The research by design should take into account the changes in society that foster a new role for architects due to technologic, social and cultural changes. Balancing between a dangerous specialization, or even on a personalized design studio that just reproduce personal obsessions of their mentors, this debate will clarify the meaning for research in design studio at masters level.
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