ABSTRACT
The hand hovers in front of a portion of an indistinguishable city, marked by multiple buildings set atop a rocky shoreline, near a body of water. The "oculata manus," or "hand with an eye," suggests a need to engage multiple senses simultaneously, with each sense informing the other. By contrast, the hands are able to eliminate the physical distance through direct, immediate, and close contact with the world. Design students' hands are critical for intimately understanding the issue of gravity that is absent in drawings and for probing relationships between architectural constraints and material realities. Instead, students are asked to begin designing with concepts and "big ideas" as a means of creative inception, gradually working toward greater and greater specificity. In a transmission model the role of the student is as a passive receptor of knowledge. Students start the design process examining the site and program organizations to develop a concept for a building design.
