Abstract

Approaching architecture as social discourse, this essay forwards a meta-model in critical context analysis for design education. Working within a social construction frame, I propose a dialogical investigation into the constitutive power of language, and discuss analytical processes in spatial communication, for first-year students of architecture. As such, this essay organizes an expository sequence of classroom or design-studio talks, diagrams, and commentary, compiled from several years of classroom experience. By this means, I model the critical processes that have most effectively helped students to self-situate within the action of social and spatial context analysis. These processes, which employ critical dialogue and co-constructed investigative research, engender modes of operation by which students may learn to qualify the products of their investigative and creative activities, and in turn, initiate new forms of those processes, practical and meaningful to them, throughout design school and career.