Abstract:

The past year marked a long-awaited return to the physical form of education, with architecture schools – like all learning environments closely tied to craftmanship – being most eager to enjoy the departure from the screens of the digital world to the pristine white paper. Even though we understand the importance of technology in education, especially as it served as the main pillar for our communication during the pandemic, we believe architecture – and, particularly, Architectural Design, is done best in the physical studio – by hand, with multiple trials, and in teams. Thus, our approach towards the first physical year of education in a long time needed to be one that would multilaterally benefit from this return. And because the dynamics of the crisis were not yet clear, we decided that our assignments should be short, and adaptable to remote learning. Furthermore, with the profile of the architecture student always changing, and because we were about to start working with individuals who spent the last two years learning online, we had to be at our creative best. All these considerations, and many more, marked our careful choreography of the first semester of the 2021-2022 Architectural Design Studio from the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning in Cluj-Napoca, which came to be in the form of four quite different briefs. The proposed subjects not only prepared the students for their first steps towards becoming architects, but also guided them back to the essentials of what it means to design. Based on our tutoring activity at the first-year Design Studio, the article presents a qualitative analysis of the four assignments and their role in building the design foundation of the first-year architecture students.

Keywords:

Architectural design, project assignment, creativity, education, student.