ABSTRACT
This text is one of a set of texts by different authors, engaging with issues that emerged within the environment of ‘design by making’ workshops with students in architecture. They all investigate specific aspects of building at full scale as an educational tool for teaching and learning architecture. The overall aim of the workshops, held together by the common denominator ‘Tectonics/Structures in Building Culture’, is to learn architecture from within practices of making, in which one engages in design and construction at scale one on one, with one type of material. The architectural projects have to be developed from the material itself and from the direct physical engagements with it, or in other words, from the actions of manipulation and transformation of the material itself and not from pre-determined ideation. The technical operations of shaping, cutting, assembling, arranging, joining and so forth, are required to be more than instrumental, given that they have to be explorative and designerly actions too. Therefore, the construction process duly has to become a design process, one that is not remote from the execution of the work, but is integral to it.
