Tools for Ideas: Introduction to Architectural Design

Architects today must position themselves within an extremely wide-ranging field of qualifications. This makes it all the more important to have a fresh introduction to the field that makes up one of their core competences, the field of design.

This introductory presentation describes and analyzes the theories, strategies, and tools of creative design for the purposes of practical work. With thoughtfulness and expertise, it opens the reader’s eyes to the processes that underlie design and demonstrates different ways of communicating about complex design work.

The first section focuses on the much-discussed relationship between design and research, between architecture and the sciences. The second section describes basic design approaches, from Vitruvius and Alberti through Erwin Panofsky and Wolfgang Kemp to Otl Aicher and Vilém Flusser. The third and largest section presents the elementary tools of design, from gestures and words through drawings, models, and simulations to critique, all as instruments of creative design in architecture and its related fields.