Exercises in Architecture: Learning to Think as an Architect

Architecture is a doing word. You can learn a great deal about the workings of architecture through analysing examples but a fuller understanding of its powers and potential comes through practice, by trying to do it...

This book offers student architects a series of exercises that will develop their capacity for doing architecture. Exercises in Architecture builds on and supplements the methodology for architectural analysis presented in the author’s previous book Analysing Architecture (third edition, Routledge, 2009) and demonstrated in his Twenty Buildings Every Architect Should Understand (Routledge, 2010). The three books taken together deal with the three aspects of learning: description, analysis of examples, and practice.

The book offers twelve exercises, each divided into a short series of tasks aimed at developing a particular theme or area of architectural capacity. The exercises deal with themes such as place-making, learning through drawing, framing, light, , uses of geometry, stage setting, eliciting emotional responses, the genetics of detail and so forth.

Simon Unwin has helped students learn to think as architects for over three decades. He is Emeritus Professor of Architecture at the University of Dundee, Scotland. Previously he taught architectural design and analysis at the Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff University. He has lived in Great Britain and Australia, and taught or lectured on his work in China, Israel, India, Sweden, Turkey, Canada and the United States as well as at other schools in the UK and Europe. Simon Unwin’s books are used in schools of architecture around the world. Analysing Architecture has been translated into Persian, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and Korean and is currently being translated into Portuguese, Russian and Arabic. He continues to teach at the Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff.