A Qualitative Approach in Theoretical Training of Architecture: ‘The Review of Reflections on Architecture’ and ‘Sense of Place’

 Theoretical trainings, especially in the fields of art & architecture in graduate programs, have lead to basic theories of experts in different branches of these disciplines that are often instructed in a linear and unidirectional knowledge order in the classrooms. The qualitative approach which was introduced for the first time as a research in Iran university of Science & Technology (IUST) based on one of the qualitative research methods in environmental perception called Phenomenology. The fundamental goal of this method is to understand the lived-experience which is regarded here as a direct & lived interaction of students with the built environment. Therefore, an issue discussed from the syllabus of the review of reflections’ classroom, with the central idea of architectural formation, was the position of the sense of place and its architectural understanding. Thus, the students lived in the place, experience it and communicated with it by their placement somewhere that they have not already experienced it in a way different from the mere study. The result which ultimately obtained from this experience was the understanding of the sense of place, which is going back to the relation between user and architecture, by graduate architecture students which have previously thought of themselves as they are in the position of a rational analyzer.