Tracing Hegel’s Philosophy and Thoughts in Educational Styles of Architecture Design Studios

Abstract

This paper aims to trace the influences of Hegel’s philosophical thoughts and ideas on the architecture design studios’ activities. Hegel is a key figure in the modern history of philosophy that lived in the time of establishing Beaux Art on the skeleton of Academie d’Architecture. Despite the many developments in different areas of education, seemingly, there are still some common grounds between Hegelian philosophy and architecture design studio activities that need to be highlighted and criticized. Content analysis and storytelling based on the structured observation applied in this research to compare two foundations. The results reveal four connections between Hegelian philosophy and architecture design studio activities, including precedents studies and historical dialectic, learning by doing and self-consciousness, crits (critiques) and idealism, and master-apprentice and master-slave theories, respectively. The findings highlight that activities in architecture design studios regenerate through studios, which run based on traditions, disciplines, and styles under the influences of Hegel’s philosophy. In conclusion, while Hegelian thoughts spread through successor philosophers in phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, Marxism, and structuralism, education in architecture design studios has continued without the regeneration of ideas.