Abstract

In “Being and Time,” Martin Heidegger states that the nearest kind of association one can have is not merely through perceptual cognition, but rather by handling, using, and taking care of things. As he noted, “we do not come to know a hammer by staring at it, but by grabbing hold of it and using it.” Undergraduate students in any school of architecture, especially those in their first and second years in the program, are inundated with countless new learning experiences and avenues of thought. Frequently missing from those experiences, however, are moments in the curriculum that allow the student to connect their generated abstractions to the actual built environment through critical acts of making. In an age of increasing focus on digital technologies and virtual architecture, these developing students also need to be introduced first hand to the physical consequences of the lines they draw on paper. By introducing acts of making into the curriculum alongside their digital counterparts, students are given the capacity to achieve a deeper understanding of their projects and of the architecture they will come to design in the future. This research paper presents one strategy for teaching introductory building construction that allows the developing architecture student to begin to cultivate understanding between the sketch, the drawing, and construction throughout the design process. Working at multiple scales, this strategy encourages these students to have a more intimate relationship with the materials of design and construction both from a technical view of construction and a poetic understanding of architecture as an assembly. Haptic connections with actual construction materials provide a tangible basis of knowledge that has the potential to inject the unseasoned architecture student with a valuable, but often forgotten, connection to materiality and the sensory potential of our built world.