Abstract:

In the second semester of 2022-2023, the first-year students from the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism from Cluj-Napoca (TUCN) were presented with a challenging Architectural Design Studio task, that of creating a (re)creative summer camp for themselves. It represented an unprecedented experiment within our studio, as the students were for the first time both the creators and the end-users of an architectural composition. As our school’s educational framework organizes students in 12 person groups, their team was already predetermined, having got to know each other well during the first semester. Each group was assigned with the common responsibility of planning and coordinating the development of the summer camp with 12 individual housing units, in a collaborative manner. Through careful investigation, group discussions with the entire team and the tutors, participative drawings and common handcrafted models, the students examined the characteristics of the site and decided where and how to design their proposal. Only after deliberate choices were made regarding each individual architectural object and after the relationships between all the proposed housing units were attentively adjusted did the students get to know which architectural object would be randomly assigned to them, for further designing and detailing. The entire project-based learning collaborative process, the struggles, the innovations, and the results – which were also the subject of an exhibition involving the works of all the Architectural Design Studios from all the architecture schools in Romania – are all described within the proposed paper.

Keywords:

Architecture, project, experiment, education, design, faculty.