Abstract

This article seeks to present the operational possibilities for the composition of the architectural object through the interface between textual and pictorial languages. This interface originated from the correlation between both languages. The research intends to extend the use of language in the architectural design of form through alternative methods to promote visual reasoning. This extension is based on an analysis of students’ perception of the geometric form. The study will consider different experiences that relate strategies derived from a coded visual rhetoric to the projected intentions described in texts and images. Such relations were first analyzed by people like Richard Serra in his Verb List and the surveys conducted by Anthony Di Mari, Nora Yoo ,and Baires Raffaelli. The idea is also corroborated in the pedagogy of three-dimensionality, as postulated by Rowena Reed Kostellow, then professor of the Pratt Institute. From their analysis, the article concluded that the pluralities of the translated operations demonstrated students’ difficulty in expressing, both textually and graphically, the manipulation of the architectural object. That finding calls for the development of new methods that could aid improvement of visual capacity, as this work proposes. Although this research does not exhaust the theme, it contributes theoretically to the discussion about the development of teaching strategies that allow the gradual construction of student autonomy through composition of the volumetric form. It also envisages the creation of a visual feedback dictionary that is coherent with the spatial language for teaching architecture students, in this case, those in the Architecture and Urbanism course at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro—UFRJ.