A working draft on design education [Final]

2015

Salama, A. M. (2015). Spatial Design Education: New Directions for Pedagogy in Architecture and Beyond, Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Surrey/London, United Kingdom. ISBN # 978-1-4724-2287-3 (Routledge New Edition). Design education in architecture and allied disciplines is the cornerstone of design professions that contribute to shaping the built environment of the future. In this book, design education is dealt with as a paradigm whose evolutionary processes, underpinning theories, contents, methods, tools, are questioned and critically examined. It features a comprehensive discussion on design education with a focus on the design studio as the backbone of that education and the main forum for creative exploration and interaction, and for knowledge acquisition, assimilation, and reproduction. Through international and regional surveys, the striking qualities of design pedagogy, contemporary professional challenges and the associated sociocultural and environmental needs are identified. Building on twenty-five years of research and explorations into design pedagogy in architecture and urban design, this book authoritatively offers a critical analysis of a continuously evolving profession, its associated societal processes and the way in which design education reacts to their demands. Matters that pertain to traditional pedagogy, its characteristics and the reactions developed against it in the form of pioneering alternative studio teaching practices. Advances in design approaches and methods are debated including critical inquiry, empirical making, process-based learning, and Community Design, Design-Build, and Live Project Studios. Innovative teaching practices in lecture-based and introductory design courses are identified and characterized including inquiry-based, active and experiential learning. These investigations are all interwoven to elucidate a comprehensive understanding of contemporary design education in architecture and allied disciplines. A wide spectrum of teaching approaches and methods is utilized to reveal a theory of a ‘trans-critical’ pedagogy that is conceptualized to shape a futuristic thinking about design teaching. Lessons learned from techniques and mechanisms for accommodation, adaptation, and implementation of a ‘trans-critical’ pedagogy in education are conceived to invigorate a new student-centered, evidence-based design culture sheltered in a wide variety of learning settings in architecture and beyond. ____________________ Review by Halina Dunin-Woyseth, Oslo School of Architecture, Norway This is indeed an inspiring and thought provoking contribution to the field of design pedagogy in its fullest sense. Calling for new forms of pedagogy, the argument for civic engagement, critical inquiry, and reflective design practices is elucidated to reflect emerging understandings of design education. With substantial international experience, the author offers an authoritative account of spatial design pedagogy with a focus on architectural and urban design education, covering a diverse range of topics in a wide variety of contexts. Tracing evolutionary theories and approaches of education from the second half of the 20th century to the present is a commendable aspect of this work. This is a must-have book for both design students and built environment professionals, but most importantly, it is essential reading for every design educator worldwide. _____ Review by Tammy Gaber, Laurentian University School of Architecture, Canada Spatial Design Education: New Directions for Pedagogy in Architecture and Beyond is a proactive book that transparently presents promising approaches to tap into latent potentials and exciting opportunities in teaching architecture. Salama's candid review and analysis importantly fills a gap in literature on architecture pedagogy. The book is comprehensive, critical and experimental and very much analogous to the way we all want to teach architecture. _____ Review by Michael J. Crosbie, University of Hartford, USA No other profession has undergone as dramatic a transformation in the past decade as architecture. In this well-researched, intelligent, and provocative examination of the history, current state, and future prospects of architectural pedagogy on a global scale, Ashraf Salama challenges us to both broaden and deepen the debate about how professional education might, indeed must, change. _____ Review by Jeff Hou, University of Washington, USA With the voice of an experienced educator on the frontline of architectural education, Ashraf Salama offers an audacious yet thoroughly researched examination of design pedagogies and ethics in a changing world. More than just a condemnation of outmoded studio culture, this book presents insightful accounts of both historic development as well as past and emerging innovations in design education. An extraordinary sourcebook for design educators and students. _____ Review by Karen Keddy, Ball State University, USA Building on a rigorous and critical examination of a wide spectrum of architectural design pedagogies over time, Ashraf Salama constructs a convincing argument for the need for a design pedagogy that is more responsive to today's social and environmental demands. Salama's well-articulated description of a multi-layered trans-critical pedagogy that promotes a democratic and inclusive theory of education couldn't be more timely. This book is ground breaking in its attempt to identify pedagogical approaches to the challenges faced in the profession by the changing role of the architect and is invaluable for researchers, practitioners, graduate students and educators in architecture. _____ Review by Harriet Harriss, Oxford Brookes University, UK Due to EU directives, UK architectural education is facing imminent change - specifically, to become shorter, more affordable, and more practice integrated - so that it matches the programs offered by its EU university counterparts/competitors. What Professor Salama's book offers is a methods statement - an invaluable resource book for educators needing to rethink their curricula to meet this demand for change. It provides passionate educators, participation-inclined practitioners and engaged students with practical inspiration from a range of excellent case studies that demonstrate experimental, spatially and socially innovative pedagogies. _____ Review by Jeffrey Haase, The Ohio State University, USA As a professor who constantly looks to unlock the doors of innovative thought and practice in the studio-based classroom, this book, Spatial Design Education by Ashraf Salama, is the master key. Salama creates the convincing argument for pedagogical change and then systematically evaluates examples of current evolving paradigms that are making that change happen. If you want to be part of that change then this book should be your guide.

2020

Learning how to learn is an essential part of architectural education, but relies on the confluence of a number of elements: effective teaching, knowledge construction, and active engagement with new knowledge in the design studio. It is here that collaboration between learners and educators is fostered, through socialization processes embedded in this discursive environment. Challenges in ensuring constructive engagement are twofold: for students, coming into architectural education means having to adopt new learning approaches, and adapt to teaching methods and styles they were previously unaware of; while also having to engage with instructors, whose approach to teaching are at times ritualized, making use of methods and techniques largely derived from prior experiences as students. This can create an environment that runs counter to the discursive learning environment that we believe the studio to be, and hindering effective learning. How then can architectural education help st...

International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2019

Visual Research Methods in Architecture, 2021

From the ‘Introduction’ to the volume by the editors: “What is or should architecture and architectural research concern itself with in a globalized, contested twenty-first century? This question drives Tariq Toffa’s architectural pedagogical practice at the University of Johannesburg. Chapter 3, entitled ‘How to draw a line when the world is moving: Architectural education in times of urgent imagination’ by Toffa, argues that architecture’s contemporary purpose is to produce agency rather than products. Arguing that globalization neglects the social, Toffa contends that an ethical imagination in drawing is needed to generate new visions and voices. Drawing from Arif Dirlik’s argument about the inseparability of the aesthetic and the social, Toffa exposes the power relations inherent in Euro-American-centric ‘visibility’ as having a significant influence on architectural design pedagogy and spatial designers. Through speculative, mixed-media drawing work, promoting a dialectic method and working explicitly with difference, Toffa’s studios explore research inquiries and conditions informed by methodological tactics of ‘voicing’, ‘multi-modality’, ‘siting (surfacing)’, ‘spaces of publics’, ‘territory’, ‘perspective’ and ‘reflexivity’. Noting the recent shifts in sociology and art history, where ‘sociological reflexivity’ is used as a research tool (d’Oliveira-Martins 2014: 193), the aim of Toffa’s and his students’ pedagogic work is to refocus an ethical imaginary that transcends and re-writes disciplinary and racial conventions through site-specific actions. Drawing can make social power relations visually tangible and Toffa’s essay makes an original contribution by presenting new drawing practices for research that decolonizes and emancipates space and architectural education.” (Troiani & Ewing 2021, Introduction: Visual research methods and ‘critical visuality’, in Troiani, I. and Ewing, S. (Eds.), Visual Methodologies in Architectural Research. Intellect publishers, 2021.)

AMPS: Education, Design and Practice – Understanding skills in a Complex World, 2019

Designing for a complex world requires architects to think critically, creatively, and collaboratively. To support the development of this skillset, the atmosphere of the design studio in architectural education challenges students to develop ideas creatively and critically reflect upon their conceptual designs for given projects. In design education, thinking collaboratively does not need to be solely defined by the sharing of ideas and information among peers, but instead can be applied to how architecture and its site can collectively inform one another throughout the design process to achieve a desired solution. Often, students are taught to sequentially operate within the design process by observing, recording, and then responding to it conditions with an architectural intervention. This procedure, while beneficial in teaching students to acknowledge and appreciate the contextual environment for their design, can be misguided as it emphasizes the site as a given, invariable constraint that is static and impermeable in nature. Architectural design involves a mediation of the designer’s intentions with the site. As such, students should be encouraged to consider architecture and the conditions of the site as malleable, accommodating bodies. This paper will present a series of projects, introduced to students in their second-year of study, that encouraged students to break the sequence of observe, record, and respond to allow site and architecture to be responsively in dialogue with one another throughout the design process. At the outset of each project, students were asked to blur the demarcations of architecture and site, among the earth and beyond to the sky, towards discovering ways in which the architecture and its contextual surroundings might respect, respond, and support one another to cultivate a desired user experience. These exercises offered students an avenue to creatively and critically maneuver the design process while promoting collaborative thinking between architecture and its environment.

2009

Salama, A. M. (2009). Shaping Architectural Discourse by Architecture Students at Queen’s University Belfast. Archnet-IJAR-International Journal for Architectural Research, Volume 3, Issue 2, PP. 130-173. ISSN # 1938 7806 __________________________________ While design practices are generally seen as a major driver for shaping debates and trends in architecture and urbanism, architectural discourse is typically shaped by discussions in books, journal articles, short essays, and reviews of design trends or critiques of buildings or design competitions. In many cases however, critical essays may have the power to communicate ideas and concepts in a concise manner while books can still be seen by some academics or many practitioners as lacking the capacity to communicate the same ideas or concepts effectively. Whether or not one would agree with this view is a different issue. Yet, as a reaction to such a view it is possible to see book reviews playing the role of short essays or articles which enable readers to grasp the message a book author is trying to convey-yet in a short and quick way. In person-environment research—as part of contemporary architectural discourse—book reviews are important as they provide significant slices of larger arguments, but enable readers to classify, categorize, and relate those arguments to other discourses on theories of architecture and urbanism, and thereby comprehending the full spectrum of issues introduced through a specific period of time. As part of a specialist subject (elective) on Socio- Behavioral and Cultural Factors in Architecture and Urban Design, which I teach to architecture students at Queen’s University Belfast, a book review assignment was delivered. The course aims at introducing students to cultural, social, and psychological issues in architectural and urban design, and their value to successful design practices. It provides an overview and analysis of the literature and major scholars, researchers, and practitioners. An integral component of the course is an intensive discussion of issues that pertain to ways in which information about socio-cultural factors and environment-behaviour knowledge can be applied to design projects. In more specific terms, the objectives of the course therefore encompass: 1) To increase students’ sensitivity to the built environment and to break any habits of taking the environment for granted; 2) To acquaint students with particular knowledge of a variety of environments including residential, work, learning, and urban environments. Since our societies are in a continuous process of transformation, we must engage in sound future design that would involve the systematic examination of the relationship between culture, behaviour, and the environment; 3) To enhance students’ understanding of the core concepts regarding human-environment relations and how these concepts vary by different cultures and sub-cultures, 4) To develop students critical thinking abilities about the role of the built form in fostering, enhancing, or inhibiting cultural behaviours and attitudes. In this article, I discuss the notion of reviews and book reviews, outline the assignment delivered to architecture students at Queen’s University Belfast, then present selected students’ reviews. While this article is simply a presentation of students’ work, the ultimate objective is to offer a package of ideas and concepts generated in the literature of person-environment interaction as viewed by the students. This is coupled with students’ articulations of and reflections on how the merits and demerits of those ideas and the way in which they relate to such ideas in their reviews. While this article does not reflect on students’ work and does not have a conclusion, it calls for a database that is exclusively dedicated to reviewed books on person-environment interactions, which could be published online on the web of one of the societies or associations concerned with people-environment interactions including EDRA Environmental Design Research Association and IAPS- International Association of People-Environments Studies.

Lymer G., Lindwall, O. & Ivarsson, J. (2011) Social Semiotics, 21(2), 197-217

This study examines a sequence of instructional work taken from the practice of critique in architectural education. In analyzing the ways in which one instructor assesses and interprets how a group of students have worked with references to other architects and to well-known buildings, the study provides a respecification of notions of interpretation and intertextuality as practical features of design work: design anticipates professional interpretation, and is thus prospectively oriented towards the retrospective ascription of intertextual meanings. The sequence revolves around highly ideologically charged sites. The instructional work around the use of references to these sites highlights the modes of architectural reasoning implicated in the competent handling of ideology in relation to aesthetic expression. Finally, the space of the critique itself is shown as a rich site for the reproduction of architectural knowledge, in which multiple spatial and disciplinary contexts are embedded through representation, discourse, and embodied practice. Keywords: architecture; education; interaction; instruction; intertextuality; interpretation; ethnomethodology

Architecture_MPS, 2020

This article argues that the typical architectural studio is both outmoded and irresponsible. It is outmoded because it typically is organized around a nineteenth-century model of design virtuosity, and it is irresponsible because it ignores pressing and current spatial justice problems. It also takes to task the aura of the academic setting in which the formally motivated studio reigns supreme. In lieu of this model of architectural education, the article argues for an education that empowers graduates to tackle the major problems that society currently faces: housing, climate, income inequality/unemployment and health. To do this, it acknowledges but suggests overthrowing the many institutional hurdles keeping architectural education attached to the status quo.

AMPS CONFERENCE 17.1 Education, Design and Practice – Understanding skills in a Complex World. Stevens Institute of Technology, AMPS, PARADE, Architecture_MPS. 17—19 June, 2019 Education, Design and Practice – Understanding skills in a Complex World., 2020

Architecture is faced with a crisis today: it concerns the loss of novelty and the search for a highly technological, sustainable function, though disconnected with humanity and environmental reality. Can young architects still conceive of and create spaces communicating the complexity and novelty of life? How could architecture be taught and perceived before the built work? I aim to explore how architectural education could respond to the development of a perception of what life is, within the spatial and social complexity of architecture. For this purpose, I would like to use the case study of a small village of the Cyclades; my argument is that studying big architectural drawings and maps, reading architectural descriptions of village landscapes or city areas, or applying sociological and anthropological principles to places is not enough. Only in these ways, students/young architects cannot acquire a profound understanding of what place is or how life evolves in it. Through narratives connected either with the reality of the village landscape or urban reality, I realized the value of metaphor as a natural language sharing a communal way of living connected with the natural and built environment. Consequently, metaphor, narrative and fiction are presented as tools. They offer students/young architects a broader and deeper understanding of what the world they will design for really is, and alleviate them from the preoccupation of what this world should be, as required by contemporary social and political commandments. They equip architects with a way to interpret the local tradition or urban structure into a contemporary way of living and innovation, without responding to architecture and dwelling through form and fashion – instead, they force them to tap more into the social and ethical function of architecture, a “meaningful regionalism” related with humans and the environment.

The Journal of Public Space

The ambiguous nature of the word "design" offers up a complex dialectic dialogue for the architectural studio lecturers to impart to their students. Discussing the "design", more commonly referred to as the programme or scheme, is quite a different beast to the process or design methodologies the students use to create an architectural proposition or "design". Clarity around this notion of design as both the process, in being design-led, and also as the end result, becomes a necessary task for studio lecturers to inculcate into the student body. This paper aims to navigate through the mire/path of the design methodologies as adopted within architecture studio teaching at second year level within the Bachelor of Architectural Studies, Unitec Department of Architecture-by way of using the tried and tested notions of First Insight / Empathy, Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, Verification, with the anticipation that these are the essential tools with which to interface teaching and practice, within the context of a "live build project". Three years' worth of case studies of large scale Interdisciplinary and collaborative "live build projects" in Christchurch in conjunction with the Festival of Transitional Architecture (FESTA) are used to demonstrate and investigate the heuristic design processes that are an integral part of a prospective architect's arsenal of skills. These case studies offered a complex window of tasks, not least that the students were designing in Auckland 1000 km away from the Christchurch sites, and each year posed a different set of problems and clients-related issues.

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.

Abstract and pecha-kucha-style presentation submitted for consideration for the Feminism and Architecture, Part 2: Women, Architecture, and Academia Conference (April 3-4, 2015) at Parsons The New School for Design.

Dubai has been labeled the emerging urban prototype: car-oriented and post-industrial, a decentralized city in which everything—roads, buildings, consumer goods—is recent. Once stable aspects of tradition in the UAE are transforming amidst swift urban development and influences from large expatriate communities. The graphic design profession has been imported from abroad, along with foreign idioms that saturate the contemporary visual environment. Dubai’s compressed development has circumvented the evolution of visual language systems beyond the iconic. This is evident in the work of design students who struggle with contextualizing and manipulating signifying elements germane to their circumstance. There now exist a number of schools in the UAE that educate prospective design professionals who will increasingly participate in local practice. To move beyond the language of generic catchphrases and stock-imagery, future designers need a formal and intellectual toolset to challenge the existing dynamic, elusive, and fantastic physical reality. Most importantly, they must experience the activity of design as responsive to the local culture. At the American University of Sharjah, in order to sustain critical practice, we assign projects that examine visual communication through; identification, deconstruction, and intervention. Identification involves the collection and categorization of familiar design outcomes: publications, ads, retail signs, etc. Deconstruction involves extracting semantic associations from a collection of mundane objects; focusing on identifying the potential of objects to function as signs. Intervention requires a visual and verbal response to the experienced environment. The projects allow students to experience the relationship between form/format, content/container, practice/context. In a place known for its lack of permanence, such activities help students fix aspects of their environment, generating a narrative history about the local design profession. Instead of a generic language of anonymity, students gain abilities to construct visual languages of significance and specificity.

Journal of Advance in Social Science and Humanities, 2017

The architectural design educational process is one of the most challenging and creative ones especially when dealing with sophomore students. The challenge in this case is relatively high amid the urge to deliver functional knowledge, spatial recognition as well as help the students explore what real meaning of architecture and creative spaces they are ready to embrace. The main challenge is how to deliver several issues related to creativity, form generation, design development as well as basics of structure and standards of functional use. This has to be implemented and delivered to the architecture students in a totalitarian and comprehensive method, in addition to leaving adequate space for each and every student to experiment and add his own values and backgrounds to the design process. Thus, the paper aims to explore and discuss an experimental design studio introduced in two consecutive studios tailored for sophomore architectural students based on a case study implemented by the author. The paper aims to introduce a method for introducing the design process to students through an inside out process which helps the students start their design education in a method which encourages creativity side by side with applying the basic standards. In order to explore this in a comprehensive approach, the paper will thoroughly discuss the process applied in both design studios, and analyze the process and development of six selected students work from both groups, with special analysis of the creativity of the selected material, the qualities of space and the reaction to context and function. This will be re-addressed in the shadows of a brief literature review of the introduction of architectural education to students. The paper concludes with a set of recommendations useful for designers and educators for improving the quality and process of architectural design education.

Archnet-IJAR: International Journal of Architectural Research, Volume 1, Issue 3, PP. 194-206, 2007

Design Studio Pedagogy: Horizons for the Future, Ashraf M. Salama and Nicholas Wilkinson (Editors), Review by Halina Dunin Woyseth, 2007 ___________________ The book in question is an extensive work, which assembles essays by twenty-six authors. The structuring concept of the book builds upon the following thematic parts: 1. Theoretical Perspectives; 2. Critical Thinking and Decision Making in Studio Pedagogy; 3. Addressing Cognitive Style in Studio Pedagogy; 4. Community, Place and the Studio; 5. Digital Technologies and the Studio. Each part has its own introduction written by the editors. The subject of the book is a field of expertise for the editors. Ashraf Salama has published numerous works on the matter since his influential book “New Trends in Architectural Education: Designing the Design Studio” (1995). Nicholas Wilkinson has been a studio educator for over 20 years and has written extensively on education and housing in addition to his experience and sustained effort as chief editor of Open House International. Their introduction to the book is followed by two invited essays by N. John Habraken and Henry Sanoff, both internationally renowned education practitioners and scholars. The message of the book appears to be a unanimous criticism of the dominating design studio practices. The book offers a broad picture of the current transformation of these practices. ______________________________ See more by downloading the full article Architectural Education, Design Pedagogy, Community Design, Social Architecture, Place Making