USING DESIGN COMPETITION CALLS IN A “DESIGN STUDIO” COURSE

The teaching of design in universities has become increasingly focused on environmental sustainability and enabling students to develop collaborative and productive relationships with practitioners. This paper is based on the assumption that design teaching in modern cities is best positioned as a joint effort between engineers and architects. It draws on the experience of the Polytechnic School of Brussels and aims to describe the innovative teaching model we developed in the form of a “design studio” course. The unique feature of this course is its use of real design competition calls as the basis for student projects and learning. The “design studio” takes place in the 3rd year of the Bachelors level course in Architectural and Civil Engineering and the teaching framework has 4 main objectives:To enable students to: 1. Develop a better understanding of the public market,2. Effectively integrate the views of practitioner experts into their work, 3. Collaborate productively across a project team,4. Respect the three pillars of sustainable development. Eighty-five students from the last four years of the course completed a course feedback survey and we conducted semi-structured interviews with ten students from the current year. The surveys and interviews focused on: the impact of the teaching methodology on student learning at different stages of the process; the learning outcomes resulting from the use of a real design call; and the nature of the relationships developed with practitioners. We concluded that taking architectural design competitions as a start point for the teaching of design studio better equip students to approach professional life. Moreover, embedding the course into a real design competition encourages stronger collaboration with student and teacher. These findings contribute to the debate about the multidisciplinary nature of the architectural design process in a complex and changing built environment.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedAMPS PROCEEDINGS SERIES 17.1. ISSN 2398-946