IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION B
Abstract
As a result of international collaboration between the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain) and the University of Siegen (Germany), various strategies and tools have been designed and implemented to improve architecture students’ learning of structures. This learning process often encounters difficulties due to the fundamentally mathematical language, which does not take advantage of the specific skills of architecture students: visual ability and learning through experimentation. Understanding how structures behave essentially means understanding how they deform (materials, elements, and typologies) in order to know which structures are most suitable for a specific design approach and to be able to estimate, even if only qualitatively, the effect that each design variable may have on the structural response. This can enable architecture students to produce higher-quality design proposals, better integrating structure and architecture. To train structural intuition, one must experiment with thousands of cases, interpreting results and comparing variations when modifying the initial parameters. This is only feasible with the right digital tools. The Rhino + Grasshopper platform allows the programming of a virtual structural laboratory so that architecture students can learn in a visual and interactive way through parametric models, thus understanding the influence of each of the design variables on the overall structural behavior. This paper presents details of the plugin developed, with the aim of making it freely available for a more visual approach to structural learning in introductory architecture and engineering courses.
David Gallardo Llopis – Architect and university professor since 1997, passionately teaches structures to architects (teaching excellence award 2011), together with an intensive professional activity as structural consultant on architectural projects with high structural demands (national and international awards), and various stays abroad, mostly in Germany. As a result of his latest year-long stay at the Universität Siegen, he has developed research into the use of digital technologies for a new approach to teaching structures to architects, based on the intuitive and visual potential of architectural learning.
Katja Wirfler is a practising architect and teaches as a research assistant at the Chair of Structural Design in the Department of Architecture at Universität Siegen. Her research focuses on didactics in structural design. In her doctoral thesis, she dealt with Curt Siegel and his significance for static-constructive architecture teaching. She studied architecture at the Technische Universität Braunschweig and Universitat Politècnica de València. After graduating in 1999, she worked in renowned architectural firms in Germany and abroad until returning to university as a lecturer in 2009.
Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Thorsten Wimar studied civil engineering at Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen (RWTH Aachen University) and received his diploma in 2001. Afterwards he was assistant professor at Chair of Building Structures of Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen (RWTH Aachen University) until 2005. From 2006 to 2011 he worked and received a doctor degree at Institute of Building Construction of Technische Universität Dresden. Since 2011 he leads the Chair of Building Structure at Universität Siegen with the main research in glass in buildings.
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Friday 26th June, 2026