Technology as a key for design imagination, an Italian experience with beginner architecture students

The paper examines the experience of a group of Italian teachers who educate beginner architecture students. Such students are enchanted by the architects belonging to the so-called \u201cstar system\u201d, and are familiar with the computer without having enough exposure to basic design concepts to understand that architecture is not a play but a very serious and ethical profession. The experience referred to by the authors is about their teaching role in a Technology Design Studio in the second year of the architecture degree at the Department of Architecture in Genoa, Italy. The teachers\u2019 purpose is to demonstrate that there is no chronological order between the idea of architecture and its \u201cembodiment\u201d: the earlier design idea should contain the potential for its feasibility development. The teaching method is intended to stimulate the students by using technology and materials to develop design imagination from the very first phase of conception until construction, stimulating them to argue and defend their choices restricting their arbitrariness and to quickly switch between various forms of expression and communication. In this way, the students should be taught that the construction culture is essential for the design culture and technology is not a restrictive constraint placed later upon a design idea abstractly conceived