Abstract:

Lately, the study of 'History of architecture' courses has lost its vitality and importance, and has become far too ignored from the current architectural design debates. Students in different schools of architecture, especially in architectural institutions with limited resources, are expected to associate History and Theory subjects with Design challenges. This does not always happen dependably and if it does, it is not attributed to educational studies and methodical teaching practices. Therefore, the process of teaching History of architecture, with the need of reinstating its relevance to solving design problems, must actively re-adjust its focus to give students opportunities to analyze more rather than learn by heart the history of the world architecture. The questions are: “How can history of architecture's courses respond to this challenge?” and “How can history teachers apply new teaching strategies to relate more to the design courses and projects?” With answers to these questions and guidance into these arguments, university educators can help students make sense of studying different courses of the history of architecture as well as benefiting from lessons of the past in their current design projects.
The research begins with reference to successful teaching pedagogies and education in history of architecture courses and continues with the author’s personal teaching experiences in different history of architecture courses in several national and private universities in Egypt. The author proposes a number of re-visualisation of different exercises and assignments adopted in history classes with the aim of translating them into ones that account for students being able to tackle their own design studio problems and use history as a tool to find answers to questions that emanate from their own design experiences.

Keywords:

History of architecture, creative teaching, architectural design.