A Focus on Pedagogy

Abstract

This paper presents and discusses a pedagogical experiment conducted at a foundation level of architectural studies at NTNU, Norway for the first time in the current academic year. The pedagogy formulates a week-long educational framework in a form of an intensive knowledge-exchange workshop. It departs from the theoretical grounding that helps contextualise the students work that resorts to several other disciplines (visual arts, film, philosophy, etc). The pedagogy encompasses embodied learning experiences, with hands-on experiments, interactive lecture/tutorial sessions that navigate the course of actions. The pedagogy is situated at an intersection in between art and architecture, but also in between the assumptions and critical thinking, between traditions and innovation. This particular framework has been designed and initiated to complement an existing foundation level curriculum at NTNU called ‘Form og Farge’ that equips students early on with relevant drawing and representational techniques which they are to employ and develop further in their studies and work life. It builds on the existing curriculum by challenging a concept of a drawing as a 2D media limited to a sheet of paper and introduces students to the drawing in the expanded filed. A protocol purposefully developed by the author outlines spatial drawing techniques and teaching/design strategies employed. Some of the strategies, such translation of drawing properties into material properties, make way for critical consideration of the prevailing notions and habitual ways rooted in the discipline. The paper argues that through the making of their three-dimensional drawings / site specific constructs, students set a critical discourse in motion that examines these notions. While it builds on this discourse that looks at the relationship between a drawing, an art installation and architecture, it makes a case that in the long run similar pedagogical approaches may advance the ways we think and create spaces.