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Comprehensive and Creative Conclusions: Enhancing Structural Design Educational Opportunities in Labs for Architecture Students

  • Feb 17, 2015
  • Robert Whitehead
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Abstract

For decades, structural design has erroneously been taught to architecture students using a modified version of an engineering-based pedagogical model. Instead of imparting a broad range of information for how structural design considerations could be critically integrated into architectural design, these courses instead focus on a narrow range of curricular topics and analytical methods that negatively impact the preparedness of architectural students for practice. To help address these deficiencies, the entire building technology course sequence at Iowa State University, has been dramatically reconfigured as a collaborative and integrative teaching environment that uses active learning environments and unique classroom activities to enhance student learning. Specifically this paper will present three different labs that occur during the final five-week course module of this structural design sequence. Each of the three exercises demonstrates particularly important, capstone-level, learning objectives. The paper will describe the means, methods, challenges, and benefits of these specific assignments and how these represent other important improvements throughout the new sequence. Examples of student work will be shown, and an assessment of the efficacy of the assignments will be presented including reflections upon lessons learned and suggestions for future improvements. INHERENT INEFFECTIVENESS Effectively teaching structural design to architecture students is an important, but complicated process. At its most basic level, architectural education teaches ways to create accommodating and experiential spaces and forms, yet the extent of possible responsive solutions requires the coalescence of a multiplicity of diverse cultural, aesthetic, and technological considerations. Although design is a reiterative process that rarely has a single correct or obvious answer, there are aspects, like structural design, that do require quantifiable verification for viability. Therefore, designing requires an ability to experiment and evaluate different arrangements and assembly options using both qualitative and quantitative analytical means and objectives. Learning these different skills can be complex and confusing, especially because these skills are frequently taught quite differently. Unfortunately, for the last fifty years, structural design has been predominantly taught to architecture students in a manner more in line with an engineering education. By continuing to base the course content and pedagogical approach primarily on calculation-based means of analytics and evaluations practiced by the engineers,

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