•  
  •  
 

Abstract

On 1997, the board of RIBA – Royal Institute of Britch Architects – highly recommended “experimental learning” or “learning by doing” methods in design studio teaching in architecture as a “practicum”. (Wallis, 2005) Although practicum is the task of learning architecture as practice, most of practicum teaching applications in architectural education are either in postgraduate level or in extra curriculum activities. Based on international studies on Design-Build educations, teaching experience and observation of fresh graduates and junior architects, there is still a shortage between design and execution in undergraduate education level, students faces many problems during project implementation phase in reality due to the lack of experience. However, most of the construction sheets provided the needed execution data for installation phase; the 1 to 1 scale imagination was missing in those sheets. As for undergraduate level, in architecture career it is highly recommended to avoid this inability by encouraging the students to build big scale projects during the education process and increase their practical skills more in such projects in order to prepare students for practice. This paper focuses on evaluating the experiment of Design-Build education method in undergraduate level, which was done at faculty of Architecture-Design And Built Environment at Beirut Arab University- Tripoli campus. The method of “Design – Build” was applied in undergraduate core courses; Execution Design I (ARCH 333), Execution Design II (ARCH 334) and Digital Design & Fabrication Course (ARCH468). During the education of these courses, the students gained a construction experience in scale 1 to 1, which in turn gave them the ability of using manual and digital building skills practically. The evaluation of this experiment was based on instructors ’ observations, analysis, final semester jury members, grading results and students’ survey that lead to give guidelines and recommendations in order to develop this educational method for future applications.

Keywords

Architectural education, practicum, Design-Build application

Disciplines

Architecture | Arts and Humanities | Education | Engineering

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.