Abstract:

From 2011 to 2013 the Department of Architectural Design at the Faculty of Architecture of the Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice conducted a research project ‘Architectural Designing of Multi-family Housing’. This resulted in creation of a university textbook entitled Multi-family Housing. Fundamentals of Designing. One of the primary dilemmas which accompanied the research team from the very beginning was the convention of imagining the space which would reflect the directives incorporated in it.

We researched literature on architectural design, mainly American, British and German. The approach was adopted to our textbook Multi-family Housing. Fundamentals of Designing should include numerous drawings similarly to the examined textbooks. The drawings should present examples of the space of different sizes as well as provide illustrations for the textual information, rules and guidelines on designing.

We worked under the following assumptions:
- The aim of the textbook illustrations is to complement the text in an unambiguous way and simultaneously enhance students’ own creativity .
- Presentation of the guidelines and instructions shall be illustrated solely by theoretical examples formulated for the sake of the textbook, with a view to avoiding creation of models and evaluation of existing authors’ solutions.
- Acknowledged historical and modern designs shall not be presented in their original but in a graphically-processed form, which will highlight attributes of the described designs.

In accordance with the above assumptions and the adopted approach to present issues from a more general to more detailed perspective, the textbook illustrations layout is made up of model theoretical solutions of: a district, housing estates, housing complexes, buildings, flats and living spaces. These solutions constitute the cohesive entirety, which helps to understand the dependencies between different scales of the same space.

Keywords:

Imagining space, university textbook, architectural designing.