Architectural Design and Construction Education

Experimentation towards Integration

Date of event: June 11-13, 2009
Sumission deadline for papers: April 15, 2009
Host: Faculty of Architecture, University of Genoa, Italy

Architecture as manifestation of our culture in space emerges through a creative synergy of artistic expertise, technical intelligence and scientific knowledge guiding the act of designing buildings and structures. The process of design through which architectural forms are produced is primarily driven by values, principles, ethics and objectives directing the creative manipulation of mass, space, volumes, materials, textures, light and pragmatic elements such as cost, construction techniques and technology, in order to achieve an aesthetic, functional and meaningful end.

An architect is involved in the creation of the build environment by translating into built forms and spatial organisations the socially and culturally defined demands of persons, groups or bodies. As a person who transforms through the architectural design practice the citizens' needs into designed proposals of physical space to be constructed, an architect should be able to operate within a variety of client, architect, management and builder relationships in an effective and professional way, within the constraints imposed by the building and construction industry, the project budget and the brief. This is why architects must possess a systematic and broad body of knowledge, skills, and theory developed through education, graduate and post-graduate training, and experience. Architectural education shall be structured to assure the public that when an architect is engaged to perform professional services, she or he has met acceptable standards enabling proper performance of those services.

It is more than 25 years that architectural education worldwide experiences a progressively growing modularization of the studies offered by the schools of architecture. As the number of offered modules is growing up, the links between them become more and more weak and unable to assure continuity in the taut contents. This fragmentation of the teaching contents makes architectural knowledge to be offered in a form of disconnected smaller entities with no clear directions for students to make the necessary connections in their effort to develop an understanding of the wholeness of architecture and thereafter to form a competent profile for practicing architect. The central question that this workshop raises is if contemporary architectural educators as well as the educational system as a whole have developed the necessary teaching methods, techniques and tools for integrating the fragmented and progressively isolated taught parts into a complete and coherent body of knowledge.

We are experiencing during the last years significant changes in all aspects of the contemporary architectural practice accompanied by new approaches in architectural theory and contemplation. All these changes in the way we understand, think and create architecture are going together with the extremely fast development of advanced information technologies and digital tools supporting architectural design during the process of generation, representation and simulation of architectural forms. In parallel, the construction Industry, responds to the new orientations of the formal and technical aspects of architecture, uses the same technology and even more the same or compatible digital infrastructure, in order to produce new materials, depended upon new construction techniques requiring specific technical knowledge. All these radical changes affect the education of the architect since the demand for integration becomes now imperative, new competences emerged from the need for integration are now of vital importance, new knowledge is necessary and new concepts and conceptions are definitely affecting the profile of the contemporary architect. The request of this new profile influences not only the contents of the subject areas taut in architectural curricula but also the whole system of studies, as it is responsible for the coherence of the education offered and the integrity of competences to be fulfilled.

One of the main characteristics of this new profile is the ability of the architect to experiment and to create innovative architectural forms by using new materials, by implementing new construction techniques, and by applying new forms of structures depending upon new sets of standards and constraints. In this new condition, the creation of architectural forms is not any more based upon a standardized construction process based upon well-known techniques and well-established materials able to materialize a broad spectrum of conventional architectural forms. The design of the forms must remain much more in contact with the construction logics, integrating all the constraints of the emerging new materiality. The growing demand for professionals able to collaborate in interdisciplinary teams with a global understanding of the interconnection and associations of all the elements that comprise architecture makes integration one of the key issues of contemporary architectural education.

There is a clear paradox between the objectives of contemporary architectural education and those of contemporary architectural practice, the former being about fragmentation, the latter being about integration. The question arising is how we can organize architectural education and deliver our architectural design and construction courses in a way that we will incorporate in our teaching the inseparable active presence of a way to think about the form with a way to think its materiality. We all accept the design studio as the melting pot of architectural knowledge but is it really the place where all the fundamental knowledge have easy access? How the traditionally separate courses of architectural design and construction will be redefined in order to assure the ability of the graduates not to design forms that another specialist will know how to construct but to create forms conceived on the basis of their unconventional materiality. How we can teach architectural design and construction assuring the creative synthesis of the designed forms with the aspects of their materiality. How we can offer an integrated knowledge where structures, materials and forms are one unique and inseparable question-issue. Does architectural education need to re-consider or even invent new teaching methods, techniques and tools in order to achieve? How is integration taught? What are the necessary assignments to teach integration? Is it a bottom-up or a top-down process?

The workshop invites:
all teachers teaching architectural design to present how they understand integration and which innovative approaches have developed in their architectural design teaching in order to assure to their students the capacity to think of form through its technical and material aspects; to find poetry not only in their formal propositions but also in their tectonics; to think of form, construction, material and structure simultaneously and in integration as a coherent whole than a sum of independent parts; to define strong concepts through studying the materiality of their forms.

All teachers teaching construction in schools of architecture to present how they understand integration and which innovative approaches have developed in their construction teaching in order to assure to their students the capacity to encompass the tectonic aspect in the forms they imagine; to envisage the technological implications of their formal decisions; to turn the material and technical limitations to the advantage of their forms; to think of form, construction, material and structure simultaneously and in integration as a coherent whole than a sum of independent parts; to re-define and re-assess the profound content that the materiality of their forms can offer to strengthen the quality of their architectural propositions.

The workshop wants to open a debate on the issue of integration starting from the most outstanding separations in our educational systems, that between architectural design modules and construction modules. We expect the workshop to reveal innovative approaches to the question of the integration becoming a collector of good practice examples able to inspire more teachers and to influence changes in our educational approaches.

The workshop will be organized in four sessions:

• Integrating Architectural design and teaching of digital fabrication
• Integrating Architectural design and teaching of materials
• Integrating Architectural design and teaching of structures
• Integrating Architectural design and teaching of environmental issues

Invited speakers will address the issues on each one of the above areas.

Extended abstracts of 300 words have to be sent to mvoyat@arch.auth.gr no later than 15 April 2009.

Further Information:
eMail: mvoyat@arch.auth.gr
web: www.enhsa.net and www.eaae.be