ABSTRACT
Since 2019, an experimental course on teaching structures for architects is being lectured at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, a school with a strong tradition on context, circumstance and drawing. The goal for this course is to explore new paths that could lead to the development of a structural intuition, integrated on their own (architectural) design process. This paper follows the evolution of first two editions of the course, from conceptual design to construction, exploring on how we can take cues from the realm of conceptual art, based on notions developed by Sol LeWitt, like the relationship between concept and ideas, on how ideas are developed sequentially, and integrate them on the conception of objects. The results of the first two years show that when students use processes from conceptual art to create structural objects, the development of their ideas is more precise and systematic, leading to a clearer understanding of structural ideas and material experimentation. Before that, initial proposals from students would be at best naïve and exploratory, most often with little regard to the effects of gravity or how things are built. After establishing a concept and ideas that are form generator, students presented and developed dozens of variations, structurally sound where feasibility became a final criterion to select the object to be built. There is an untapped potential on the relationship between conceptual art and structural design, which we are only starting to grasp.
