Learning through Making in Architectural Design: Realizing Embodied Pedagogy

Design education begins with the student’s embodied experience of the world, yet this foundational aspect often goes unexamined in the development and implementation of design pedagogy. Instructors may take for granted the complexities of learning design, while students grapple with muddled thinking as they navigate unfamiliar methods and concepts. This book reimagines design pedagogy, not as a transfer of abstract knowledge, but as a transformative process rooted in the student’s own sensations, inquiries, and lived-experiences.

Drawing on the philosophies of Pallasmaa, Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, and others, this book presents a pedagogy that fosters transformative growth by learning through authentic encounters. By engaging in the immediacy of making, students immerse themselves in heuristic investigations that integrate experimentation, conceptualization, and reflective critique. This approach enables students to internalize knowledge within a transformation of lived-experience, cultivating their agency and evolving their mindset as designers.

This book is an essential resource for educators, design instructors, and academic leaders in architecture and design programs. It offers a framework for fostering student transformation and self-development, making it invaluable for those seeking to educate the next generation of designers through experientially embodied learning.

Stephen Temple, Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning, University of Texas San Antonio, has degrees from Carnegie-Mellon (1980), University of Texas at Austin (1993), and 10 years in practice and hosted NCBDS (2005). Stephen teaches architectural design, beginning design, and aesthetic theory and has over 100 scholarly publications with research investigating architectural design pedagogy and theory, psychology of learning, philosophy of perception, phenomenology, photography, and design/build. Two previous books, Making Thinking: Beginning Architectural Design Education (2011) and Developing Creative Thinking in Beginning Design (2019), support student self-development and creative thinking. His current scholarship investigates embodied strategies for learning architectural design.