Lessons in making Teaching
ARCH 4820/8800 Course Listing
Course Description
Students in this upper level seminar explore ways to understand, clarify and communicate fundamental design concepts. As a section leader for a group of 6 to 10 first-year undergraduates, each seminar student experiences hands-on the challenges of teaching design. Working closely with the course instructor, section leaders develop ways to encourage artistic creativity and help young students discover their own expressive voices. In the process, each seminar student reconsiders and refines his / her own ideas on how and why we design and make art.
Each student in the seminar helps teach basic design principles to undergraduates in Lessons in Making, Architecture 1020. This introductory design course explores the delights and dilemmas of making physical objects. With simple tools and modest materials (paper and pencils, brushes and paint, cardboard and glue) students create drawings, paintings, sculptures, and architectural and landscape proposals. Our goal as teachers is to open our own spatial imaginations while nurturing the beginner's capacity to engage in a joyful yet self-reflective design process. Like music and dance, design is a dynamic process in which perception, analysis and composition are profoundly intertwined.
It is a fundamental premise of this advanced teaching seminar that ideas of beauty and the common good are deeply interconnected. The interplay of aesthetics with social, political and ethical ideas in art and architecture provides a conceptual background for our creative work as teachers of design concepts. Each section leader considers not only formal but ethical implications of design choices, for example the selection of certain materials, which might be appropriate or wasteful, or of certain tools and techniques, which might trivialize or celebrate the process of making.