Pedagogy 2025

Abstract

Architecture education faces the multifaceted challenge of fostering creativity and autonomy, ensuring the technical competencies required by the contemporary practice, and addressing global sustainability concerns. Within this context, Building Information Modeling (BIM) stands as a powerful approach; however, its use in architectural education is often limited to technical aspects of design processes and construction-oriented tasks. This narrow adoption overlooks BIM’s potential to support performance-driven design in earlier phases, where design decisions have the greatest impact. At the same time, design studios continue to rely heavily on minimally guided pedagogies. While such approaches may encourage independence and foster creativity, they often fail to provide sufficient scaffolding for more demanding design approaches such as performative design. Together, these tendencies reveal a critical pedagogical gap. This study addresses this gap, by providing a conceptual discussion informed by learning theories and their implications for architectural pedagogy, developed through a review of literature. Rather than relying on a single theoretical stance, the study embraces systematic eclecticism approach, which strategically combines different learning theories to suit diverse instructional contexts. This pragmatic approach is then linked to the specific challenges of BIM integration into conceptual design education, emphasizing the need for pedagogical models that balances individual learning with structured forms of guidance, while responding the cognitive demands of digital design environments. The study ultimately calls for a closer alignment between educational approaches and architecture pedagogy in the digital age, particularly in the context of BIM-enabled learning, performative design and sustainability; and aims to inform subsequent empirical research.