Bridging Form and Function: Educating Designers For Creative Form-Making and Design Reasoning

Architectural design teaching has traditionally set creativity as one of its main goals and, simultaneously, has developed learning methods in order to convey basic concepts and instructions on how buildings could respond to different types of technical and functional requirements. Creative design generally confronts the relative inexperience of first year architectural design students on representational, technical and functional contents. A clear pedagogic challenge emerges on how to stimulate creative designs where aesthetic, technical and functional reasoning are simultaneously enacted. This paper describes a method where computational strategies have been used to generate processes whereby aesthetic concepts were developed towards a creative interface with functional and technical requirements of building design. The method entangled a four-step procedure, exploring form generative processes through computational reasoning. Results have demonstrated that if form and computational reasoning is developed ahead of function assignments it would encourage original solutions simultaneously based on technical and aesthetic explorations.