Maremat & Me'mari-e Iran

Architecture requires creativity and its teaching is a creative issue and accordingly, teaching architecture
is complex and it cannot be limited in determined and pre-defined frameworks. Despite
the educational scholars’ efforts in recent decades, and by some reflections from the architectural
works in this period, it is observed that such teaching styles are accompanied with failures in their
ideals. The recent increasing number of students in this major has also doubled the educational
problems of architecture teaching centers and schools. So it is inevitable and necessary to maintain
the least minimums in the quality of teaching architecture. Thus, the two courses of “construction
and construction material workshop” and “construction materials” are selected among
the various and multiple courses of architecture major, due to their content similarities, to improve
the teaching quality. “Improving the construction quality” and “regional and environmental accordance”
and finally, “aesthetics”, “stability”, and “living conditions improvement” are among
the results of teaching such courses. Therefore it is tried to understand and find better solutions to
improve the teaching quality through collecting data from library sources and questionnaire analyses
among the professors and students of this major. The necessity of the combination of these
two courses in a theoretical and workshop framework presented in the first semester is one of the
most important results of the present study. It is hoped that this new course provides the following
objects: the students’ theoretical familiarity and then the practical one with different construction
materials, providing the skills to apply them for multiple form construction and/or manufacturing,
attention to the aesthetic features, geometry and solid stability conceptions and understanding the
role of construction materials and forms in architectural works. The other results of this course
are: increasing the attention and curiosity of the students, increasing the interest toward the architecture
major and interest for learning and group work teaching through creative exercises.