Aim
The course aims to help the student apply the design methodology taken up in a more abstract way in earlier courses to the type of clearly defined and commercially oriented tasks taken up in architectural practice. The educational goal is to create continuity in the learning process through extending methodological insight attained earlier, applying it here at a project level involving greater difficulty and complexity of the design tasks, and greater need both of effective communication and of understanding the underlying theory. Thus, the aim is to combine what has been learned at a more purely academic level with the commercial realities with which the student will be confronted after completing his or her studies.

Knowledge and understanding
For a passing grade the student must

• be able, under supervised conditions, to within a short period of time prepare a competitive proposal of high quality architectually able to meet the demands of a competitive program..

Skills and abilities
For a passing grade the student must

• demonstrate the ability to prepare picture material and presentations of high quality concerning an architectural object she/he has designed.

• give evidence of being able to quickly search and find information of relevance to the needs posed by a given architectural task, to utilize the information then to develop an adequate to the task, and to present this then in the form of drawings and models.

Judgement and approach
For a passing grade the student must

• demonstrate the ability, under conditions of being supervised, to solve a task of this sort within the time allotted.

Contents
The architectural competition provides the student the opportunity for carrying out a clearly delimiuted architectual task in which, under the supervision of teachers likewise involved in the course, the student has the opportunity to carry out design experiments of advanced character with the aim of developing her/his knowledge of architectual design. This allows the student’s results to be assessed from separate standpoints. In part, they are evaluated in terms of the academic demands that instruction given within the framework of a project places on tasks carried out under conditions of competition. In part, they are also evaluated in a broader perspective, involving assessments made by independent experts, who evaluate it against the background of the competition’s aims and goals, independent of the Architectual School’s teachers or the architectual views of the School itself.

There are three areas of design dealt with in the course, distinguished from one another on the basis of the design methods and overall approach involved:

Investigating how designs that have been conceived but have been deemed impossible to carry out can be developed in a manner allowing them to become reality, this being done in a manner allowing the quality of the design and the basic spatial relationships to be retained.

Realizing the importance of a process-oriented spatial design involving an integration between spatial considerations, technology in general, building technology, and the material considerations, together with methods concerned with coordinated planning, practical aspects of construction work, manufacturing processes, industialization procedures, access to energy and to various natural resources, and conservation of natural resources.

Utilizing nethodologies and theories concerning design, processes of various sorts, structures, and visual communication, as well as digitalization, as well as techniques for spatial simulation, together with analyzing in critical terms various theories and metodologies, historical matters, criticisms within the field of architecture, social relationships, cultural considerations and questions integration.

Approach

The basic teaching approach adopted here involves a series of workshops, lectures and seminars presented and led by a guest professor of international renown, the work students do being oriented to preparating them for the competitive program referred to. The invited guest professor is to initiate intensive and concentrated activities focused on ideas and questions of a sort in the center of interest at the world’s leading architectural schools today.

The aim is to study contemporary urban development and its relations to space, to the scales involved and to architectural objects, taking account of these three areas of design. A study tour to Paris that participants can take part in can provide those who take this trip considerable insight into the background to many urban phenomena, those to be noted there concerning in particular the complexity of a progressive urbanism during the 1800s and 1900s involving both architecture and city planning.

Literature
To be decided upon by the invited guest professor.