Pedagogical devices for the initiation of architectural design: between Basic Design and simulators.

The way in which students should start learning architectural projects has been the subject of numerous controversies during the twentieth century. From the substitution of classical order analysis by the pedagogical experiments of avant-garde art schools and the expansion of American Basic Design in the first half of the century, to the multiplication of teaching strategies since the 1960s, the initiation to the architectural project has generated an indefinite multiplicity and variety of pedagogical and project approaches. This diversity is still present today. During the last decades, the first project courses in many schools of architecture have experienced the deployment of diverse working techniques such as collage, assemblage, installation, or performance; the integration of heterogeneous materials such as metal, wax, plastic, fabrics, or fluids; and the reinterpretation – through digital media – of the so-called “abstract problems” that prescind from the site, the user, the client, or the program. At the same time, to start learning architectural projects, many students build housing and urban furniture in marginal communities, design small-scale buildings based on social and environmental themes, and analyze paradigmatic works of architecture with the aim of applying their design strategies. As a result, the first architectural project workshop has become a space for experimentation where exercises of different natures coexist. Within this plurality of techniques, materials, and scales, it is possible to clearly distinguish two pedagogical approaches. On the one hand, there are the workshops that begin with the practice of the project and, therefore, tend to simulate the professional practice of the architect through exercises that simultaneously comprise all the aspects that characterize the complexity of an architectural work (the program, the form, the technique, and the relationships between these components). At the other extreme are courses that distance themselves from the project and dedicate the first activities to establishing a repertoire of basic principles of design and visual composition applicable to various artistic disciplines (Basic Design). The thesis studies a third possibility already explored in a fragmentary way in certain teaching practices in recent years and which has not been thoroughly investigated so far. These are workshop exercises developed specifically for the teaching of architecture that have the particularity of separating themselves from the traditional activity of the architect without deriving exclusively in tasks of visual composition. As a hypothesis, it is proposed, on the one hand, that these exercises are made up of networks of actions, interactions, knowledge, didactic tools, spaces, and times that facilitate the development of knowledge and skills specific to architecture. On the other hand, that the arrangement of their elements, their functioning mechanisms and their objectives can be analyzed and understood through the adaptation of the concept of device to the initial pedagogy of architectural projects.