Robert F. Evans
The course I teach is called Drafting and is introductory in nature offered to all students as an elective subject in grades 9-12. The student may or may not have had any previous drafting experience. The year long course is divided into four marking periods. Each unit during the year is designed to improve basic drafting and learning skills. Basic drafting techniques require the proper use of tools and symbolic knowledge. Learning skills require reading, writing, and arithmetic to be integrated as building blocks and objectives of the units.
It is my objective to show how architecture could be used as a thread connecting all of these skills and allowing the student to express goals in a visual form.
I found that the more I tried to isolate the topic architecture as a unit I found more ways to use it in each unit during the year.
Words are an important part of the communication process and necessary for language development. The first unit I teach is concerned with graphic design. Usually a student feels threatened in learning to handle and draw with unfamiliar tools when first beginning a drafting course. When the design problem is built around something as familiar as words it is easier to hold and stimulate interest.
The student develops a familiarity with basic drafting procedures and becomes perceptually functioned with flat and perspective design. Avery important objective is to stimulate an interest in words and their meanings while enhancing these skills.
In order to enable the student to design an environment one should have a working vocabulary of design terminology. The term architecture gives infinite possibilities for definition depending on the school of thought one is introduced to.
Architecture has many definitions but very little meaning either in or beyond the classroom for the average student.
I propose that experience at a personal level can be an effective means of bringing the word architecture into the real world of the student.
Architecture by definition could be considered an art form with buildings seen as monumental sculpture. Architecture is also a science requiring imagination to develop design and to construct the personal and civil space in which we find ourselves a part. Architecture is sometimes defined in terms of the character style or period of a building. At other times it might be seen as a particular form with a specialized function. Often architecture is thought to be esotericin nature and disciplined by need. Sometimes we can understand space simply as in ordinary seashells, beehives, or warrens.
The quest for a definition of architecture should involve a search of personal experience which seems to connect any or all of its aspects in a manner which the student can identify with.
Architecture could be simply defined as living space. The first step in understanding is awareness. When the student begins to see all space around as architecture, understanding of style, proportion, color, and imagination become understandable concepts which can be dealt with.
These concepts are necessary to handle design problems and exercise critical assessment in forming value systems to judge the results of efforts to design an environment by the student.
The following is a suggested list of words to use in developing design literacy.
WORDS
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Line
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Balance
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Creativity
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Art
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Texture
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Integrity
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Awareness
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Style
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Beauty
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Education
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Perspective
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Color
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Critical
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Ideation
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Design
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Assessment
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Projection
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Accuracy
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Form
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Bionic
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Originality
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Function
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Change
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Imagination
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Proportion
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Valves
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Neatness
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Rhythm
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Prejudice
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Structure
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The following is a lesson plan to help define architecture.
