Architectural Studio Research Articles

A 3D quick sketch algorithm in virtual reality for concept design in architectural studio

A 3D quick sketch algorithm in virtual reality for concept design in architectural studio

Design for assembly in construction system: three iterative upgrades of a panelized system

ABSTRACT As a scientific design methodology, Design for Assembly (DFA) aims to enhance product assembly efficiency through the design simplification. Checkered Playroom, a children's activity building designed by Unitinno Architecture Studio, has been constructed in over 160 times in China, undergoing three iterations of design. This paper begins with a brief review of the development of DFA concepts, and then provides a detailed discussion of the design, composition and construction of the three generations of Checkered Playrooms. Finally, through an analysis of the assembly design of the three generations of Checkered Playrooms, design strategies for improving assembly efficiency are discussed, including the reduction of part quantity, the increase of module size, the improvements in module shapes, and the simplification of connection joints. These strategies can also be applied to other building system designs to enhance assembly efficiency.

Towards an affects of care: a cross-national study of university caring practices during COVID-19

ABSTRACT This paper joins the conversation around care and maintenance through an account of affects of care in architecture. Affect and its binding power allows us to trace how care releases bodies, including the architectural body, into performative potentials – affect produced, exchanged and accumulated in care work. We present an empirical study across two universities (architecture studios) that provide insights into the complexities of caring and facilitating care by listening in to the multiple care-taking voices and care-engagements, within the context of COVID-19. We draw out the intimacies or bindings that are generated by and through such care acts in three interrelated ways: affective-material tinkering, stuttering temporalities and promise of care and its loss. In conclusion, we suggest how caring for a building is far from uniform and offer some future direction as to how an affects of care account can be helpful in studying diverse modes of (being in) the world of care in/through the built environment.

Structural literacy in architectural studio learning

ABSTRACT Architectural education encompasses a multidisciplinary curriculum including design, theory, history, technology, environmental considerations, urban planning, social aspects, and professional practice. This study aims to investigate the extent to which students can effectively integrate structural concepts into architectural design. This examination takes place within the framework of a third-year architectural design studio course, where students advance their design processes with input from architectural design instructors and experts in structural concepts. To facilitate this endeavour, a simple visual screening form was introduced to aid in the learning process. The study utilises a newly generated survey, namely ‘Structural System Control Form’, which is inspired by the rapid visual screening forms, to assess the students’ comprehension of structural concepts during a 14-week architectural design studio. Employing a descriptive and correlational research approach, the study assesses the effectiveness of this integrated strategy in enhancing the students’ understanding of structural principles. The findings revealed a notable development among students who participated in the integrated approach, highlighting the value of feedback and evaluation from instructors versed in construction. Furthermore, the use of simplified structural models in students’ projects improved their understanding of structural concepts and their ability to incorporate them into their architectural representations.

Immersive representation for visualizing surface temperature and integrative lighting in architecture

This paper illustrates the potential of representing and reading environmental data captured for immersive visualization of indoor built environments. This study introduces methods for qualitative representation of light and heat in aligned viewing directions in immersive scenes. It employs a novel technique for capturing High Dynamic Range (HDR) and thermal images in 360-degree directions. This technique allows visualization of radiant temperature and integrative lighting variations associated with the viewing direction and time. The highlight of these visualizations is the identical viewing points in studying the indoor ambiances. The paper provides visualizations derived from hourly data captures in architectural studios through a 360-degree thermal-visual capturing device. The paper aims to present these results through various visualization formats, including architectural planar presentations, diagrams, and colour maps, showing surface temperature and Photopic and Melanopic illuminance intensities. Architectural insights gained from each of these visualizations are highlighted and discussed. Specifically, the results of this research illustrate the potential of the immersive image-based environmental assessment and visualization method for representing indoor ambiances regarding their non-visible thermal and lighting conditions through time and across all viewing directions within the space.

EVALUATION OF INTERACTIVE SPACES FOR ENHANCED LEARNING IN ARCHITECTURE DEPARTMENT BUILDINGS IN NIGER STATE, NIGERIA

The design studio is still the focal point of curricular programmes in architectural faculties around the world, and it is regarded as the gold standard for architectural design education. However, the architecture studio's primary role in the existing academic framework of architectural education needs to be reconsidered. As a result, a shift to architecture studio design is required to create an environment that delivers an immersive and collaborative feeling of setting for studio users. The job of architecture is to build and develop places that fulfil the demands of architecture users and the usage of spaces by different individuals and groups of people, just as an architecture design studio is considered as a learning environment and usually a location where interactions occur. This study investigates the methodologies and goals of architectural design for open space facilities that relieve stress in learning environments such as those found on university campuses in a compact urban setting. The literature reviews, along with expert input, indicate strategies for integrating sustainability as the foundation for achieving a functional institutional environment structure for Nigerian schools of architecture; thus, this serves as the foundation for the development of a questionnaire to collect relevant data. Improving quality and service delivery through better interactive space organisation. The findings suggest that architects should incorporate sustainable building areas into their theoretical preparation. According to the study, it is critical to set standards for an alternative design approach that is user-centered while also strengthening the training of student architects by creating more interactive spaces.

Selecting applications to increase the efficiency of distance learning in architectural design

PurposeIn light of the technological advancements and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on educational systems, universities worldwide had to find new methods to ensure that the educational process continued. In many countries, including Egypt, it has become a priority to direct their institutions toward digital transformation, using electronic means in the educational process. A set of challenges emerged in the educational process, especially in architectural learning, focusing on the design studio; problems intensified and some professors rejected the idea of distance learning, announcing their strong adherence to traditional face-to-face learning. This research aims to find a methodology that informs the choice of digital technology in architectural design courses.Design/methodology/approachThe researchers used both qualitative and quantitative methodology based on inductive, analytical, interview-questionnaire and empirical studies in Egypt.FindingsResults show that many criteria affect the selection of proper applications. Also, using multiple applications in architecture design course helps students understand the material. However, hybrid learning is crucial in teaching architectural design since it cannot be effectively conveyed solely through distance learning.Originality/valueThe results of the research will help improve and develop the distance learning system in architectural education by proposing a methodology for choosing suitable electronic tools for architecture studio courses. These courses enhance the effectiveness of students' understanding and comprehension during the distance learning process to increase motivation for thinning development, imagination and educational skills.

Training Architects as Activists: Social Sustainably in the Studio

This paper discusses the application of social sustainability to architecture through a second-year graduate architecture studio focused on urban buildings. I designed the Urban Design Studio in such a way that future faculty could choose assignments between five socially sustainable equity issues: housing, food insecurity, transportation equity, access to opportunities, and environmental health. This supports the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) graduate curriculum by focusing on sustainable practices, including activism in architecture. Using the built environment as a platform, the students learn to promote equity, especially in the urban environment. The students research on equity topics, adopt a position on a selected issue, and begin to develop a site, program, and building form around their issue. Architecture has a unique ability to influence social sustainability through equity, especially if we shift our design practices to support disenfranchised populations. Buildings can provide more than social markers. They can create locations that empower local communities. The question is, how do we teach a process that instills this as foundational to quality design? My studio’s process not only establishes a foundational knowledge of building within an urban context, but also provides a firm grounding of activism as central to architectural practice.

Repairing What’s Broken and Breaking: Melbourne Public Housing and OFFICE Architects

This paper is a response to the growing crisis of “disrepair” in the built environment. Alongside the material disrepair that looms in the wake of imposed neglect and increasingly volatile weather, another disrepair prevails. This is the production of a housing market to which we are unable to repair in comfort; from its financial inaccessibility and uninsurability, to its inadequate climatic performance, and, by virtue of its entanglement with the carbon logic of energy extraction, its ongoing complicity in the destruction of planetary conditions. These realities highlight the complexity of fixing a housing system that is both broken and actively breaking. In this paper, I recentre the reparative dimension of repair, as suspending rather than entrenching the old, through a close reading of the Melbourne-based architecture and research studio, OFFICE. Combining the reparative aims of retrofit and care, OFFICE provide an effective beginning in a programme of architectural repair.

Cooperative Learning in an Interior Architecture Studio

Design studio in interior architecture education is rarely conducted as a group learning activity, despite the benefits of preparing students for team-based industry work environments. Students have learnt to be protective of their design ideas and are not always encouraged to share resources, although theories on social learning indicate a deeper learning experience is achieved through collaboration. The theoretical framework for cooperative learning, as a form of collaboration, is extensive and positively supports the virtues of group work as an effective learning activity. This paper describes an action research cycle of preparation, implementation and reflection of a cooperative learning project with third year interior architecture students. For the purposes of this research, cooperative learning is defined as a structured group work activity, with participants working together towards a series of common objectives. The main objectives were for students to experience a typical interior architecture work environment, to promote deeper learning and foster a culture of sharing ideas and resources.

McLuhan’s Tetrad as a Tool to Interpret the Impact of Online Studio Education on Design Studio Pedagogy

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a surge in online studio education, which has presented a significant challenge to traditional design studio teaching methods that rely on face-to-face interactions between instructors and students. It is contended that online studio education enhances the accessibility of design studio pedagogy, making it possible for students to learn from anywhere in the world. However, it also challenges the development of tactile skills, which are crucial in design education. Additionally, online studio education can render certain aspects of traditional design studio pedagogy obsolete, while bringing back elements of design history and theory that may have been overlooked in traditional studio teaching. It can also be argued that online studio education has the potential to reverse the traditional power dynamics between instructors and students, resulting in more democratic and collaborative forms of learning that can empower students. As the literature on the effects of online studio education is growing, there is a need to understand how the shift from the material space and its affordances to an online environment affects the core components of an architectural design studio. To understand the effects of this new medium, this research employed Marshall McLuhan’s tetradic approach, a hermeneutic tool to perform a critical interpretation of any medium by examining four simultaneous effects: how it enhances a human sense, what it makes obsolete, what forgotten aspect it retrieves, and how it flips into its opposite at its extremes. A literature review was conducted to analyze the effects of online studios from a tetradic framework and identify the major discussions of the impact of online studio education. The methodology involves a two-part literature review. This study specifically focused on peer-reviewed, empirical research published after 2020, and the authors used search terms related to online architectural studios during the pandemic. The process identified 176 records of peer-reviewed empirical studies for further analysis and 20 papers were read and included in the review, defining repeating topics/themes and organized under four categories pertaining to the founding archetypes of an architectural design studio: (a) setting and communication, (b) actors, (c) outputs, and (d) dynamics. This process was followed by organizing the findings and interpreting them within the tetradic framework to develop a comprehensive understanding of the consequences of the online design studio. Overall, this research aims to provide a detailed and nuanced analysis of the impact of online studio education on design studio pedagogy, conceptualizing McLuhan’s tetrad as a basis for the analysis, and therefore aiming to enrich our understanding of the post-COVID-19 era of learning architecture by examining the dramatic change in the medium and its effects.

Design and demonstration of a prototype thermally active student desk in a modern landmark for personalized cooling retrofits

This paper presents the design and evaluation of a prototype thermally active student desk (TASD) for personalized cooling retrofits using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and field experiments. The study first developed an initial conceptual design for a TASD prototype made to esthetically match the desks in an architecture studio in a historic building that is frequently subject to comfort complaints. CFD simulations were used to validate the conceptual design and determine some component and system features. Four functional prototype TASDs for cooling were constructed and tested in the studio space with university students while the rest of the building was maintained at an extended temperature set point. CFD simulations predicted that the percent people of dissatisfied (PPD) would be ≤6% under all simulated scenarios. Surveys of 11 occupants who used the TASD revealed PPD of 9% (1/11), while PPD was 14% (17/120) among participants seated elsewhere in the building. The mean level of satisfaction (LOS) was similar among the two groups and thermal sensation vote (TSV) was slightly lower for the TASD users. This study demonstrates how a personalized conditioning system could be designed and integrated into the existing esthetics of buildings to provide cooling retrofits and potentially save energy.

Yerel Kültür Bağlamında Bir Stüdyo Çalışması ile Mimari Tasarım Süreci Deneyimi

In the globalizing world, the transfer of the cultural fabric of cities and regions, urban landscapes, to future generations is deemed a pivotal issue. Imitative endeavors, crafted to pass on local culture through architectural works, not only breed misunderstandings of the local culture but also impede architectural development. The incorporation of local culture into original architectural works and its fusion with modern architecture has emerged as a formidable design challenge. The transmission of this design challenge and the associated awareness to architects can be achieved by emphasizing the subject in studio education. In this context, a boutique hotel design project was executed in Sille, a historic settlement, as part of the Konya Technical University Department of Architecture Studio 4 course during the 2022-2023 Spring Semester. Throughout the course, students were tasked with developing projects within the framework of the concept of ‘place’. The expectation was for students not only to grasp the concept of ‘place’ but also to comprehend its seamless integration into the architectural project and resolve the spatial organization of the hotel. At the end of the semester, six student projects were selected and evaluated within the scope of the study. The analysis of project proposals revealed that while students demonstrated an understanding of the concept of ‘place’, there was a partial inadequacy in effectively reflecting the local culture in their architectural projects. In this regard, it may be considered to add other course(s) to the curriculum to support the design process, especially to enable students to grasp the relationship more easily between local culture and architecture.

Teaching experience report in architecture studio

This article presents a pedagogical experience in the discipline of single-family residential design in the architecture and urban planning course at the State University of Santa Catarina. We structured a quantitative analysis of the results from the first joint experience of the teachers with a class in the studio. The main objective of the text is to contribute to discussions on the practical and theoretical teaching-learning of architecture. To achieve this goal, we organized the text starting with a brief literature review on active and passive methodologies used in project studios in undergraduate courses. We present an analysis of our journey, culminating in the presentation of the developed project's data and a brief reflection on the performance and results of our students.

Teaching Sustainability in Architecture through Collaborative Online International Learning

To confront global environmental challenges, architectural design can play an important role to achieve sustainability. This paper addresses the Online collaborative approach to support the integration of environmental sustainability. It will assess the efficacy of integrating collaborative online international learning exchange (COIL) and cross-cultural dialogue pedagogy into a sustainable architecture studio course to develop students’ architectural and intercultural competencies. In this study 16 groups, each group consists of 3-4 students, from An Najah university in Palestine and Memphis university in USA were involved in shared learning classroom model. Different methods were used to assess the students’ outcomes, such as reflection reports written by the students, the use of new technologies for design and communication, and the outcomes from the architectural design. The results show changes in the students' understanding of different cultures, they improved their communication skills, and their ability to design in different contexts. The findings also underline the importance of integrating COIL into architectural design education to create professionals who are able to design a resilient and sustainable built environment. The paper introduces intercultural dialogue framework and a new pedagogical technique in the field of virtual exchange.

Contribution of Natural Lighting in Workspaces to Visual Comfort Improving User Productivity

Visual comfort is an essential aspect of workspace interior design, especially architecture studios where creativity and productivity can affect the health and well-being of users. Poor visual conditions can lead to eyestrain, headaches, and decreased work productivity. This study the factors that affect visual comfort in architecture studio workspaces against user perceptions. This research method uses SketchUp simulation experiments, VR (Virtual Reality), and questionnaires to determine the user’s response to visual comfort in the architecture studio workspace. The variables used in this evaluation look at the amount of light entering, window openings (WWR), wall materials and colors, perceptions of visual comfort, and work productivity. The results showed that natural lighting plays an important role in creating visual comfort, with the right lighting intensity, so that it has a positive impact on user health. In addition, the use of bright wall colors such as white and orange tends to make a positive contribution to the user’s visual environment which can directly improve work performance and productivity. This study proves that workspace design with the right lighting and color selection can have a positive visual impact on users with sustainable lighting distribution techniques and methods.

Discovering and Mapping Aspects of Spatial Publicness

The value of public spaces and their social function in cities has been the source of numerous writings. The questions posed in our undergraduate architecture studio at the University of Cyprus are: “What core design aspects create successful public places, and how do they constitute conscious design processes?” and “What are core values that create successful public places and how are they consciously integrated in a design process?”. This paper will attempt to address the topic of spatial publicness within a framework of translating observations of the above into design strategies and tools. These aspects have formulated the basis for recent design briefs, tested within an architectural studio context from 2nd year coursework, while at the same time being translated into transferable values, such as diagnostic and synthetic tools, appropriate for an undergraduate architectural studio. They formulate the basis of an ongoing research project tested within the studio context and utilizing case studies from the output of students’ work to draw conclusions that guide the pedagogical approach.

INTEGRATING INTUITIVE AND SYSTEMATIC APPROACH IN THE STUDIO

This paper aims to explain the experiment conducted in 4th semester architectural studio incorporating integrated approach to intuitive and systematic studio teaching. After a brief overview of the evolution of architectural teaching, the research delves into the intuitive and systematic studio teaching integration approach as employed in second year studio. This research argues that owing to different learning styles and subjective nature of the design problems in architecture, architectural studios should embed flexibility in both content design and teaching methodologies of a studio. A detailed discussion with images of the works produced and processes adopted, on the content design and methodologies vis- a- vis the second-year studio establishes that an integration of intuitive and systematic approach does augment learning and achieving the set studio objectives.

Book review; “Spaces of Republic in Sivas, 1930-1980”,

Modernization of an Anatolian City, Republic Places in Sivas 1930-1980 is a book written by Uğur Tuztaşı and Pınar Koç and published by YEM Publishing in Istanbul in 2022. In the book Dreaming for Sivas Selections from Architectural Studios, 2014-2021 (Tuztasi and Koc , 2021) (Hacihasanoglu, 2023), edited by the same authors, it is seen that some of the buildings discussed in this book are given as context in architectural design studios.

Highlighting Community and Identity through an Online Interior Architecture Studio Project: Ambassador’s Residence Project

Within the confines of the COVID-19 pandemic, design educators were required to revisit tried and true ways of teaching and create original ways to connect with their students. In this paper, the aim is to achieve the sense of global interiors community in online teaching regarding teaching methods as well as project topics. Moreover, various means by which an enhanced studio experience may be provided is investigated. The year-long project with a focus on “concept building”, benefited from a variety of approaches and resources that is believed to enrich the overall experience. One of the first aims was to enable a sense of connection and community at a time of detachment. This was achieved in a number of ways; the first step was through requiring students to work in teams of two. The second step was to use the opportunities of online education to the full extent. In this sense, both national and international guests were invited to the studio for lectures and critiques. Lastly, on special days such as the IFI (International Federation of Interior Architects/Designers) World Interiors Day and juries, both national and international guests were invited to the studio to share experiences with students that were shared on international platforms. Through an ambassador’s residence project, second-year interior architecture students were able to experience aspects of their profession in an international environment. An enriched experience both in terms of structure and content was aimed to be achieved and the projects reflected these aims. The selected projects portrayed in the paper answer the requirements in full, are parallel to the context, and reflect the key criteria of the project. A questionnaire was applied to the participating students to gather deeper insight into their studio experience. Limitations include the number of participant students, and thus, further studies may include larger groups of students, national and international comparisons of experiences as well as studio output. Despite the large-scale catastrophe, findings show the benefits of increased online interiors community activity in the experience of the students as well as being reflected positively to their projects. These events have also benefited the instructors’ connection to the studio. Overall, the interior design studio is a dynamic environment that needs constant research into its pedagogy, content, and overall experience, as the educational environment moves swiftly to online direction.