June 3, 2016 Professors DeKay and Göritz collaborate on education paper for national conference
Professors Mark DeKay and Hansjörg Göritz collaborated on a paper about the curricular design for beginning graduate students in architecture. The paper, entitled, “In the Beginning Were Buildings: the Radical Idea of Learning Architecture by Designing It,” was presented at the 32nd National Conference on the Beginning Design Student in San Luis Obispo, California. The conference was held February 26-26, 2016. Their paper addressed experiments over several years in beginning design education for 3.5-year Master of Architecture program. Göritz and Dekay were interested in curricular answers to the questions like, “What is fundamental to design?” and ‘What must be taught first now?” These questions frame what students perceive as the core of their discipline and generate different student products and learning outcomes. According to the authors, “The essence of our work was to frame six essential lines of knowledge development in building the consciousness of an architect and to identify the fundamental level (1:) of knowledge and skills for each. By this we arrive at a low complexity, level 1 to level 1 correspondence among all six related and co-defining but irreducible knowledge lines—yielding beginnings that are in no way proto-architecture, but rather, buildings.
Download: IN_THE_BEGINNING_WERE_BUILDINGS
