Structure as (primary) generator of architectural design: a study of a master dissertation studio

Abstract

The design studio plays a central role in educating architecture students to develop design skills and be creative when dealing with the complexity of ill-defined design problems. One way for students to cope with these problems, and find a way into the design process, is to reduce the complexity by framing the problem. This can, for example, be established by focussing on the design component of structure as a broad field, ranging from engineering theory over structural materials, products and systems to construction details. It allows to create a variety of structural frames to step into the design process, and generate architectural design proposals. This design generation, starting from the student’s structural knowledge, that leads to creative design, is the subject of this paper. For this research, 36 master dissertation projects were analysed, developed under the supervision of the author. In these projects architecture students created a personal link between the realm of structure and their architectural design to generate architecture through structural framing. This resulted in a final design project and a dissertation with reflections on the developed structure-based design generators. This paper shortly introduces the applied studio approach to help students implement their structural knowledge for design generation. Furthermore, it presents 14 identified types of structure-based design generators, to illustrate their potential in architectural design and to provide a frame of reference for students to develop creative design skills.