A Peer Review Benchmark Portfolio for ARCH 411: Integrate

In North American universities, the comprehensive, or integrative studio, represents an important moment in the curriculum of architecture programs where students are likely to encounter especially challenging design problems due to the integrative thinking required at a number of scales. Providing students with concepts and tools to handle these problems at this stage is therefore crucial to their success in the studio and their development as architects. This research explores the application of dynamic multi-objective optimization (DMOO) concepts and tools within a comprehensive studio context to help students improve their ability to explore tradeoffs between design solutions. DMOO offers a rigorous conceptual framework and provides methods for the comparative analysis of design solutions and their trade-offs. To test this claim, a pedagogical methodology to integrate these concepts and tools is described and then tested through the comparative analysis of student work. The results show that use of DMOO concepts and tools in the early and late stages of design does improve exploration of trade-offs between possible design solutions