Design is a process that solves problems of a multilayered nature: each design problem must be solved for some combination of spatiality, materiality, structure, environment and comfort. The sensitivity required to deal with these aspects of design all originate in an awareness and understanding of the human body, not just as an abstract object (“user”) but as an intimate subject.
The foundation of the whole course in Architecture, then, is based in the sensitization of the subjective body, i.e. the mind-body of the student.
The student is involved in activities that engage their senses: visual, tactile, auditory. Further elaborated, these actions lead to greater sensitivity in the visual field: colour, depth perception, abstraction. In the field of hapticity: Imagining 3D space, complexity in volume and effects of elementary objects on space; anthropometry as a first metric of spanning our immediate world. In the field of materiality: dealing with various properties of material, combinations and joining, structural behaviour, soft/hard/ductile/malleable/brittle etc. characters of objects. Overall, a first introduction to representation onto paper and the idea and utility of the concept of architectural scale as representational ratio.
