A study of ideologies and methods in contemporary architectural design teaching: part 1: ideology

This paper reports on a survey of aproaches to architectural design teaching, which involved architectural design educators from Australia and New Zealand. The purpose of the survey was to obtain data on individual approaches to architectural design teaching, and to find out whether certain common elements of understanding were present in such teaching. Participants were asked two questions; firstly what is their ‘Ideology’ or set of principles which they believe in as the basis for creating an architectural design, and secondly what ‘method’ do they use to teach that design ideology to groups of students. This paper focuses on the first question, recording the preliminary findings of a study of the responses. Initial analysis shows that the ideologies held are as varied as the teachers, ranging from objectively expressed sets of principles to expressions of personal preferences. While certain common elements can be observed, much clarification and understanding will be needed to relate the findings to any intelligible and operative model for teaching.