concept in architecture; a necessity in design process and challenges of its education in architecture colleges

nowadays, numerous realities in the field of architecture has gathered architects’ concentration; this has alienated designer’s attention from theoretical thinking in the initial stages of design process. new considerations such as human attitude and orientation in urban areas, the environmental impacts, behavioral relations between man and building, considering sociology and psychology in creation of building form, etc., rather than traditional considerations such as positive/negative quality of created space, municipality’s guidelines, etc. in real situations, has put the designer in difficult conditions. he should purify these data and simplify them in the form of a concept; otherwise, the large amount of design requirements ultimately leads to a brain stop in the process of creating and developing concepts. the designer should recognize the most important and the most real priorities and use them as a criterion for selecting and improving his concepts. in fact, what that happens in the “concept production” period, is prioritizing and selecting one or more dominant factors in his design. then, in the development and accomplishment period, he should move in a way that finally none of the design factors would be neglected, by the use of studying, scientific care, and critical viewpoints. this study collected the definition of concept from variety of resources, trying to summarize extends of its meaning and to describe its different types. then, gathered information has been analyzed using descriptive-analytic research method. finally, this background has been classified, and applied instructions has been concluded for use in architectural education.