Art and Design Commons^™

A Cumulative Studio Design Sequence: Students Learning Within The Context Of Their Own Work, Valerie S. Goodwin

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

This paper describes a series of beginning design studio projects developed over the span of five years.To varying degrees, beginning architecture students in these studios are asked to explore different types of connections between quilting and architecture. The concept for this series relies on the use of projects that build on each other and are divided into discreet manageable parts. Each represents an incremental step in the overall learning process. The threads of this project sequence are based on the process of abstraction, manipulation, and transformation. Pedagogical issues are carried forward into each successive project and are layered with specific …

The Consuming Process, Gregory Herman

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

The production of architecture has changed dramatically over the course of the last decade or so; this is a fact we, as educators, are all well aware of. Change has occurred in the areas of theory and representation, and certainly in the area of pedagogy, in ways both subtle and dramatic. My own experience as an instructor in design education began at the end of the eighties, and since that time I have witnessed an ever-tightening frequency in the normal courses of change. A common issue that has become more and more crucial since that time is the issue of …

Seeing/Site: A One-Week Project, Peter Hind

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

"Seeing/Site," is the first project given to freshman students in the Analysis Composition rotation of the Visual Literacy program taught at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. The program is interdisciplinary and is in its fifth year with enrollment close to 300 students and 8 faculty members instructing. Visual Literacy encompasses architecture, interior design, fine art, textiles/clothing design, and fashion merchandising. Seven-week units comprise the yearlong course: Drawing I , Drawing 2, Color; and Analysis Composition. Analysis Composition focuses on issues of form, mass, surface, space, and the relationship between two dimensions (2D) and three dimensions (3D).

This paper will illustrate …

Learning From Cultural Space: Connecting Culture And Environment In Beginning Design, Jeffrey Hou

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

The paper begins with an introduction on the background of the course, the students, and the assignment. It then introduces a selected group of projects, including the opportunities they have created for discussing the multiple dimensions of space. By examining the students' projects, the paper looks at how the exercise provides a vehicle to connect the students' life experience to design, and how the complex issues of culture and multiplicity of space can be introduced at the beginning level. The paper concludes with an observation on the multiple instrumentalities of the exercise and its broader implications for beginning design education.

Ordinary Unfamiliarity: Foundation Pedagogy Through The Critique Of The Everyday, Kevin R. Klinger, Marc Swackhamer

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

In our new foundation program, we proceed from two principles of instruction: first, we direct the focus of work away from conventional architectural topics and use analogy to awaken native critical insight; second, we postpone traditional "design" activity by strictly emphasizing observation skills and critical analysis. We delay design activity until the first quarter of the second year, in preparation for which we organize firstyear \tudio workshops around short iterative exercises that capitalize on the students' familiarity with the everyday world. We then structure these problems to render the everyday world in unfamiliar terms. This oscillation between the ordinary and …

Design As A Liberating Practice: Design-Build With First Years, Eduardo Aquino

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom [studio], with all its limitations, remains a location of possibilrt.y. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face realrty even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress.This is education as the practice of freedom.

In The Beginning -- We [Design For] Humans, An Opening Studio Curriculum For An Architectural Professional Program, Alex Maller

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

Two years ago, aft.er long deliberations, the Archrtectural Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln formally adopted a significant programmatic change: it restructured its curriculum from a 4+2 curriculum to a 2+4 curriculum. In the same time the status of the program was redefined as a 'professional' program similar to other professional programs, such as Law and Medicine. These changes enable the program to adopt a more autonomous position in the University. As part of the restructuring process a number of essential changes were introduced, two with a significant impact on our current discussion: [a] the two first years were incorporated …

The Space Of Mondrian, Lori Brown

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

How does one introduce a beginning design student to spatial concepts and spatial ways of seeing? As John Hejduk states the architect begins from the abstract - a world of ideas, of concepts, of aspirations - and gravitates toward built form. Students must first see and critically assess and question this abstract world before they can make the jump toward the real world. They arrive with so many misconceptions about architecture yet have no conceptions about the abstract world.

The Viewing Machine, Alice Minsoo Chun

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

Technology in architecture. rhetoric of construction. often expresses an erotic search for knowledge. As Marco Frascari explains, "Technology is the fertile factor for the architectural production of elegant meanings, it deals with both the construction- the logos of techne (elegant art)- and the construing- the techne of logos (rhetoric)." ¹ In this case technology translates from figures of thought into figures of site, and figures of making. It may be construed as a condition that attempts to answer the question: How does one begin? The curriculum developed for the Undergraduate Architecture Program at the University of Pennsylvania provides a place …

Listening To The Past: Persuasive Stories And The Beginning Design Student, Nathaniel Coleman

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

Architecture students tell stories about their work. These stories are meant to convey information about design philosophy, design intent, and design concept. Such stories are intended to have something to do with the work students present. Often, though, what is said is accepted as valid simply because it is said. Closer scrutiny of the relationship between what is said and what is presented frequently reveals a wide gap between intention (what is said) and result (what is done). Incongruity between intention and result encourages a loose way of thinking that fosters a separation of thought (theory) from doing (practice). Concurrently, …

Musical Beginnings: Musings On Teaching With Music In The Fundamental Design Studio, John Maze

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

The beginning design student, like any other. is confronted with a world riddled with a multiplicity of physical, sociological, and psychological conditions that can thwart efforts to objectify contextual design determinants. Given the complexity of the twenty-first century environment, students should perhaps be given a non-building t ype of environment to hone their analytic abilities prior to taking on such a proliferation of perceptual stimuli. Physical environments such as urban settings that typically make up the sites for early design problems are simply too complex for students to first learn to perceive their surroundings in an objective manner. Too many …

An Architectural Exhibition: "Bench With The Film Of Its Own Making", Jonathan A. Hale

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

This paper describes a design-and-build studio project carried out at the University of Nottingham with students in their fourth year - although elements of it could also be considered appropriate for the 'Beginning Design Student'. The programme for the project is based on the premise that there is a fundamental continuity between the human body and the rest of the world. This idea has been around for some time and appears in a variety of forms: The Biblical quotation above which suggests a material connection between body and earth; the early medical theories of Hippocrates which describe the influence of …

Ventures In Dichotomy: Rigor And Tolerance In The Beginning Studio, Hector Lasala

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

As a beginning design teacher for over twenty years, I have learned that educating beginning designers entails reaching a delicate and difficult equilibrium between two contradictory positions: while maintaining the rigor of high aspirations that expect all students to exhibit sophistication of concerns and execution in their designs, one must also remain aware that each student's process is unique and fragile. This condition summons one to tolerance (not to be confused with indulgence) and much patience. This pedagogical approach, one that we practice at our school, is provokingly summarized in a phrase by one of my accidental mentors, "We are …

Detail Of Two Cities: Utilizing Urban Analysis And Recombination As The First Project In The Fundamental Design Studio, John Maze

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

In the fundamental design studio, I have been using two disparate cities from dramatically distinct topological and topographical situations as the protagonists in an American urban love story. Students dissect the essential structure and quality of each city into discernible layers of data, and speculate about the similarities and differences between the two. Then collaboratively, students "mate" the cities together to form an offspring city that contains the "genetic" layers of data from its parents. The teams of collaborators must critically transform both cities into one, designing the insertions and overlays from one into the other at the regional scale, …

Setting A Baby Into The Grass: A Biological Model Of Interactions Between Concrete And Abstract Learning Experiences, Stephen Temple

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

Give a baby its first experience in a grassy lawn and it will roll and frolic in the grass, reveling in its presence against its skin, in its hand. Its fingers will fondle and finesse the blades, press into the mass of roots, break and tear. Learning takes place literally at the fingertips, in the direct experience of the feel of each blade. New connections to the physicality of the world are formed and, in so doing, corresponding new representations of that world are created. Each new contact with the world becomes then an experiment, a test of these representations …

The Design Process: Charcoal Drawings, The Qualitative Representation, Mo Zell

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

Beginning design studios generally stress a quantitative method of representation; a method that describes a project in a formal and precise manner, typically including hard-line plans, sections and elevations. Absent or underutilized from the design process is a qualitative method of representation that records more of the evocative qualities of a project. This qualitative method of representation is emphasized in my teaching process through the use of charcoal drawing as an exploration of space and light. It is especially important that this method be taught in the beginning design studio so that students include qualitative representations into their own design …

Assemblies: Full Scale Construction In The Freshman Design Sequence, Aron Temkin, Scott Smith

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

The first year design faculty has been running a spring semester shop project for many years: Scott Smith has influenced this work as Shop Director since 1985. The examples documented in this paper are a cross section including two examples from the I980's and several more recent examples from the last ten years. The primary objective of this paper is to document the success and variety of this work and consider the factors impacting its variation, how the particulars of the assignment contribute more or less to the project objectives, and provide some background context for other scholars who may …

Allusion, Illusion And The Beginning Design Student, Albert C. Smith, Kendra Schank Smith

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

This paper explores aspects of media that concern illusion and allusion. It will present some examples of beginning design student projects to question and elucidate both the inherent differences of these potentially dichotomous terms and how they might lead us in a more concordant direction for teaching beginning design and visual communications in architecture. In recent history, we have seen examples of drawings such as those published by Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind that have had an inclination to place archrtecture into a greater state of allusion. These drawings are exciting and provoke the thoughtful references to the poss ibi …

Education Of An Architect: Through African-American Constructions, Scott Ruff

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

No abstract provided.

Spatial Themes In A Three Week Project, Corey Saft

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

In speaking to The Enigma of the First Assignment. the premise of this paper is explained with a studio in which a design project is addressed through sets of rules. Rules fall into three categories: for program, for site, and for assembly. These rules were left open-ended and they provided the first footholds for a student to get to work designing and not ponder the much larger problem of design itself.

The Silence Of The Studio Lambs: How To Hear Your Students' Voices In A Postmodern Design Studio, Elijah Mirochnik

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

Ideas that underlie postmodern thoght are rarely used in conversations about archrtectural education the way that philosophers and lrterary crrtics have used it since the early 1970s: as a call to abandon that portion of modern vocabulary that sustains Plato's story that Truth is something that already exists, that our own human capacrties are not enough to get us a glimpse of Truth, and therefore, that some method that is detached from our own inadequate capacrties is needed if we are ever to extract the Real Truth from our mortal inclinations toward deceiving ourselves by believing in mere opinion, felt …

The Sandbox: An Introduction To Form & Form Making Through Notions Of Surface, Brian T. Rex

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

Visual Literacy is a two-year-old cross-disciplinary instruction unit that encompasses a "learning community" of Textile and Clothing Design, Architecture, Interior Design, and Fine Art students in their first year of foundation design education. This pedagogy is a three week long unit (with 9 hours of contact time per week) in a two semester long program. Each faculty member teaches one of four thematically charged instructional units through which studio sized groups of students rotate over the course of a semester. The thematic foci of the four units are Drawing, Color; Frame, and Form. This specific unit is the Form unrt:. …

The Parallel Projection, As Flights Of Fancy, Mary Nixon

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

For a student of architecture, developing imaginative points-of-view and drawing acumen, is a must. The parallel projection is one such drawing type that aptly addresses point-of-view. Its three-dimensional properties and simple methodology make it a standard of beginning designers. Its inclination toward aerial adventures is an especially important feature to understanding its use. This paper examines the long history and sometimes-parallel track to architecture the parallel projection has enjoyed.

The Pedagogics Of Play, Jay Mcclure

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

Teachers should emphasize the importance of play to a student's development, noting their individual talents they need to explore, tryout, take apart and investigate which is fundamental to learning. Design fundamental programs should develop pedagogies that guide student's play into progressive learning experiences in the essentials of form, mathematics, geometry, and creativity.

Giving Back: Student Architectural Product Research In Service To Practitioners, Jill B. Pable

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

It is the nature of the profession that practicing architects and designers are busy people who are faced with keeping abreast of quickly changing construction technologies. Manufacturers of architectural and interior products provide knowledge, but their information is often biased to serve their business objectives. Therefore, impartial information regarding new products is scarce. Students, particularly those new to the field, have the need to develop research skills, become acquainted with materials sources, and develop the ability to critically consider manufacturers' claims. Further, students benefit from interaction with the professionals they seek to emulate.Therefore, an architectural materials service learning project was …

Why Do You Always Make Us Think? Maintaining A Journal In The Beginning Design Studio, Karl Puljak

Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

No abstract provided.