Advisor: Marcos Favero

Dissertation: Project, model and prototype: teaching and the craft of architectural design in the digital age

Defense date: 12/09/2024

Abstract

This research addresses the relationship between architectural design
teaching methods and advances in digital technologies, highlighting the transition
from analog to digital design, as well as forms of complementarity between these
approaches, emphasizing the importance of preparing students for such
transformations. It seeks to investigate an approach to teaching design that
reinforces this complementarity and that gives fluidity to design practice. It
proposes reflections on how architecture schools can prepare for the digital
paradigm. To this end, it starts from the concept of the dialogism of doing and
thinking for the creation of an emancipated knowledge present in approaches to
reflective practice in the context of architectural design. It then seeks to draw a
parallel between analog and digital design as complementary forms of work. It uses
the concepts of reflective practical teaching in the works of Donald Schon and Paulo
Freire to demonstrate how the practical work approach to architectural design
becomes a powerful tool for the assimilation of knowledge and the construction of
a critical consciousness and, by extension, of an emancipated knowledge. It also
incorporates Richard Sennett’s concepts on artisanal engagement and Juhani
Pallasmaa’s on embodied knowledge as elements to highlight how reflection based
on artisanal work in the ideation, design and execution phases can promote greater
student engagement. Finally, it uses the theoretical framework constructed by Rivka
Oxman, together with other authors, to outline an overview of the state of the art of
digital architectural design, in the field of computational design through the concept
of design based on materials and fabrication.