Comprehensive and Creative Conclusions: Enhancing Structural Design Educational Opportunities in Labs for Architecture Students

For decades, structural design has erroneously been taught to architecture students using a modified version of an engineering-based pedagogical model. Instead of imparting a broad range of information for how structural design considerations could be critically integrated into architectural design, these courses instead focus on a narrow range of curricular topics and analytical methods that negatively impact the preparedness of architectural students for practice. To help address these deficiencies, the entire building technology course sequence at Iowa State University, has been dramatically reconfigured as a collaborative and integrative teaching environment that uses active learning environments and unique classroom activities to enhance student learning. Specifically this paper will present three different labs that occur during the final five-week course module of this structural design sequence. Each of the three exercises demonstrates particularly important, capstone-level, learning objectives. The paper will describe the means, methods, challenges, and benefits of these specific assignments and how these represent other important improvements throughout the new sequence. Examples of student work will be shown, and an assessment of the efficacy of the assignments will be presented including reflections upon lessons learned and suggestions for future improvements. INHERENT INEFFECTIVENESS Effectively teaching structural design to architecture students is an important, but complicated process. At its most basic level, architectural education teaches ways to create accommodating and experiential spaces and forms, yet the extent of possible responsive solutions requires the coalescence of a multiplicity of diverse cultural, aesthetic, and technological considerations. Although design is a reiterative process that rarely has a single correct or obvious answer, there are aspects, like structural design, that do require quantifiable verification for viability. Therefore, designing requires an ability to experiment and evaluate different arrangements and assembly options using both qualitative and quantitative analytical means and objectives. Learning these different skills can be complex and confusing, especially because these skills are frequently taught quite differently. Unfortunately, for the last fifty years, structural design has been predominantly taught to architecture students in a manner more in line with an engineering education. By continuing to base the course content and pedagogical approach primarily on calculation-based means of analytics and evaluations practiced by the engineers, architecture students miss critical opportunities to learn about the larger design implications of structures. Ultimately this mismatch of learning/teaching preferences between engineering and architecture leads to diminished enthusiasm for learning and decreased retention levels for the subject matter (Felder, Silverman, 1988). This discord between what is taught and what should be taught to architects isn’t just a problem of missed opportunities for enrichment, it affects professional preparedness if students are unwilling, or unable, to critically engage or evaluate aspects of structural designs. In fact, the lack of student preparedness to critically integrate building technologies is frequently listed atop the complaints from practitioners and recently graduated students alike in the National Council for Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) annual Practice Analysis of Architecture reports (NCARB, 2012). Unfortunately, even though structures typically comprise between 15-40% of the overall cost of construction and represent the single biggest risk factor for professional liability, the National Architectural Accreditation Board (NAAB) provides very few requirements for structural education, granting this topic only one sentence in their most recent draft for requirements for an accredited architectural education (NAAB, 2013). Although it is clear that at some level an alternative pedagogical approach is needed, there are often fundamental impediments to these changes and few mandatory requirements for initiating these changes. IMPEDIMENTS TO IMPLEMENTATION The challenges of teaching structural design are relatively unique in an architectural curriculum. In practice, structures is very design-oriented with a focus on problem solving, but the ability to solve these problems relies upon detailed knowledge of math, physics, material science, and construction methodologies that must first be understood before significant design options can be viably explored. In other words, there are two distinct, and often divergent, sets of skills need to be taught: design and technology. Historically, the common thinking has been that the technological knowledge needs to preclude design so frequently the classroom settings, teaching methods, and course content aren’t inclusive to both sets of needs—focusing on the traditional approaches to teaching engineering. This pedagogical method typically favors the sensing/active or factually based learners (like many engineers), as opposed to the intuitive/reflective learning preferences most typically self-identified as architecture students (source). The course information is typically taught deductively (going from fundamentals to application), even though the opposite approach, induction, is the predominant method used in the plurality of a project-based design curricula of architecture. Further problems occur when courses are lecture-based, passive learning environments, with little opportunity for alternative activities (Felder and Silverman, 1988). At a curricular level, structural design courses may run counter to the larger educational culture of architecture if the various structures courses don’t require escalating levels of expertise between courses (e.g., traditional courses sometimes focus simply on analyzing different materials each semester). When fundamental skills are developed across multiple years in the courses, it becomes more in line with the larger learning objectives for the program and the evolving skills of the students. These observations point to two major categories of constraints that architectural programs face in trying to amend their structural sequence: Curricular/administrative limitations (such as course credits, classroom settings, staffing, etc.) and pedagogical intentions (reconciling required and desired learning objectives, teaching practices, expertise/experience of instructors, etc.). As this paper will demonstrate by examining the revised building technology sequence at Iowa State University, when both constraints are amended in concert, a slew of educational benefits can occur. EXPERIMENTS IN INTEGRATION The goal of the reconfiguration process was to create a better, more integrated, undergraduate technology sequence that created better opportunities for innovative teaching and effective learning opportunities (Whitehead, 2014). To facilitate these changes, the initial major modifications were necessarily administrative. All three building technology courses (materials/assembly, environmental forces, and structural design) were combined together into a single course sequence spanning across five semesters. Each semester is equally divided into three equal modules of five weeks (one module per topic). The credit hour total for each class was increased but the overall amount of credits within the entire curricula for all tech courses (when combined) remained unchanged. At least three different instructors (each with practice experience) teach the courses so each instructor can teach “across topics” and include integrated design assignments as part of their module (Nelson, Whitehead, 2014). All aspects of the courses were updated accordingly and reconfigured, including the classroom settings. The courses use a “lecture-lab” system in which the first portion of the class is a lecture that presents the information that students need to solve a set of design “problems” during the lab portion of the class that immediately follows. The combination of the two classroom settings provides an opportunity to have both active and passive learning portions of the class and a diversity of activities and representations of learning to occur (a significant improvement upon the traditional either/or choice for classroom settings). Research about effective engineering educational influenced our choice to include problem-based and project-based learning opportunities in our labs (Mills, Treagust, 2003). However, scholarship on the matter published in the Journal for Engineering Education over the last 20 years has been consistently rare (Feisel, Rosa, 2005) so much new ground needed to be established. The structural module, titled Structural Technology in Practice (STP) incorporates a series of purposefully selected, structural-centric, design exercises into the labs (alongside the occasional traditional calculation-based assignments). During these multi-hour active-learning labs, which are intentionally more akin to a design studio, students are taught to develop different strategies for creating and assessing their work—a process simply known as “think, make, break, + evaluate” (Figure 1) (Whitehead, 2013). Interestingly, some of the scholarship about effective engineering education frequently referenced the architectural studio model as influential (Kuhn, 2000). Assessment is typically based upon the lab reports for the “project” that the student teams create. These lab reports feature technical diagrams, drawings, models, calculations (when required), written justifications work, and a summary of “lessons learned” about the topic. This broadens the options for learning styles and promotes a multimodal means of representations—both demonstrated strategies for increasing the learning capacity, retention and enthusiasm (Tolentino, 2009). Ultimately, because this project-based learning approach is pervasive throughout their studio education, the structural courses become more in line with their overall educational experience and not a curricular anomaly. Because the course spans across five semesters (beginning during the student’s first semester in the professional program and concluding during their comprehensive studio semester), a larger pedagogical narrative can be established for each course individually and for the entire sequence collectively. Across the sequence students complete forty different labs, allowing a diversity of lab activities to occur in correspondence with the subject matter (e.g., some labs require frequent calculations while other explore detailing). This is one of the most important benefits to the reorganization process because it allows instructors to maintain contact with students each semester, helps monitor students development, helps to improve student retention, and allows the courses to develop a natural trajectory of escalating complexity and difficulty. This paper will focus on the three lab projects completed in the fifth, and final semester of structural program. The three projects are all intentionally quite different Figure 1: Testing student designed and constructed slab