Teaching-learning of architectural design

Abstract

For almost 25 year the formal teaching of architecture has been developed in Yucatan, and as it has happened in most parts of the country , the syllabuses , as well as general methods and procedures , have been founded and developed upon concepts inherited from some vanguards of foreign “Modern movement”. For example the influence of the German school known as Bauhaus, through the presence of programmes of “basic design” or “principles of design” among the national curricula, or the exaggerated rationalization of architectonic design in the teaching-learning process and the unalterable sequential order, first of two and finally of three dimensions in many of contemporary Mexican schools.

After so many years, this practice of exogenous origin, has ended up lessening the importance of perception in the creative process, inverting the dimensional relation between the individual and his created environment. Perhaps that is the reason why the projects from the national school are repetitive, poorly imaginative or creative, imitating foreign models and expressive elements in non-discriminatory way. Against this faulty way of approaching the teaching-learning process of architectural design, there is an alternative to develop the perceptive skills of the students through the multiplication of “non-pre-rationalized” experiences and compulsory tri-dimensional, rescuing and re-assessing simultaneously the intuitive and “obscure” part of designing, drawing him closer to the normal processes of perception, understanding and learning of the human mind.