Structural Design Pedagogy for Architects: Fostering Cross-Disciplinary Integration and Innovation

This study develops and presents a qualitative and design-oriented approach to structural design education as part of architectural education. Existing approaches to structural design in architectural education for the most part seek to emulate, adapt and simplify contents and methods typically employed within civil engineering education, where structures are primarily understood and taught within the framework of static principles and numerical analysis. In architectural practice, observations however show that architects rarely employ numerical analytical methods. Instead, architects tend to design based on experience and intuition, with structures subordinated to, and mostly indirectly generated by, decisions focusing on architectural programme, form, scale and space. This discrepancy in approaches results from different perspectives on the structural design process: Whereas civil engineers mostly conceive it in terms of the analysis and dimensioning of given statical systems, architects tend to see it as the creative design of the structural system itself. This contrast and discrepancy forms the background and motivation for this study. Accordingly, the main research question investigated in this study is: How can structural design be taught so as to enable architecture students to approach structures as part of their architectural designing?. The study critically examines existing approaches to structural design education in architecture to identify skills and abilities supporting architectural structural design competency. Based on findings derived from the theoretical first part of the study, an alternative approach to structural design education is developed to foster and support such skills as part of architectural design education. The second part of the study presents the practical implementation and analytical assessment of theoretical assumptions in the form of an action research study over the course of five years. The applied study is conducted in the context of an international university located in China. Findings of the study demonstrate the potential of a qualitative and design-focused approach to structural design pedagogy in architecture to engage students and to embed structural learning in students’ applied designing. Supporting educational approaches that foster innovative cross-disciplinary collaboration, contributions of this study are relevant in structural design education, including the fields of architecture as well as architectural and civil engineering. With education laying the foundations for later practice, the study presents ways in which future collaborative practice can be supported. Results of the study are particularly relevant and timely in the context of China, where, despite continued calls for educational innovation, architectural design remains mostly separated from structural design in both education and practice.