ABSTRACT
Understanding the interactions between structural systems, material assemblies and environmental forces is critical to delivering an architecture schema that is sustainable. In fact, a multi-disciplinary understanding is required if we are to realize the goal of balancing energy input and output, during construction and over the long-term life of a built structure. An architect’s core skill must be able to navigate the complex and often conflicting interactions between construction and material technologies, servicing requirements and regulatory demands in the context of an uncertain future. It is incumbent on educators to address not just how we build but why we build with students as early as possible in their education cycle.
As educators and practitioners, two architects and an engineer, we have integrated our separate teaching modules, Assembly and Techniques, Gravity and Reaction, and Environmental Systems and Forces, as an overlapping teaching course for 1st to 3rd Year undergraduate architects unified in the acronym, AGE. As a methodology, we teach as an “interactive” Design Team through sketching and “layered” drawings that examine that which has endured and that which has not, to look towards the future of design as “integrated design”. The weekly sessions are framed within the overarching ambition of AGE: to formulate a continually questioning position on how buildings are constructed with an added focus on the relationship between matter, form and energy through overlapping disciplinary discussion.
