The Model of Criticism Application for the Use of Precedents in Architecture Design and Training

One of the activities that designers and design students usually do in their design process is using the precedents and similar projects and buildings. Design precedents are solutions attained in prior design problems which partially or generally can be used in the problem at hand. An overview of prior studies demonstrates that appropriate use of precedents can increase the creativity of students, although there is the risk of surface adaptation and copping. To prevent this risk, it is important to find tools and methods which could help students and designers to use precedents methodologically and concentrate on fundamental feathers on them. One of these tools is architecture criticism. Since the purpose of architecture criticism, mostly is comprehensive cognition and understanding of the architectural works, using criticism can be helpful in understanding of design precedents. This study tries to find an approach among the presented ones in architecture criticism which can aid the student to achieve the concept of the precedents and understand them in the best way. This paper studies the references in the context of criticism and precedents by the descriptive-analytic method. Then, proposes a model to criticize the precedents and understanding them in a better way. The proposed model includes three steps: diagnosis the specific quality of precedents, discovering the causing factor of those qualities and finally achieving the generalizable patterns. To explain and make these steps clearer it can be said that as many studies which were done on criticism just describe the buildings and less focused on analysis of them, also because the designers use the precedents to generalize the result of it to their designs, it can be proposed that in the first step the designers try to diagnose the specific quality of precedents and then try to discover the causing factor of those qualities. It can be suggested that there are two ways to diagnose the specific quality of precedents; first through the question that there is in the new problem, that means the problem which the designer tries to find a solution for it, cause him or her to refer to precedents. Second through the observation and searching on the precedents that can reveal the specific qualities of them. The diagnosis of these qualities has two results; first cause the designers to ask questions to find the causing factor of those qualities (second step) and second with exact study and finding the answer of those questions and also by making those qualities simple, the generalizable patterns can be reached (third step). It can be added that this kind of confronting with precedents does not mean that the systems that present some criterion for architecture criticism or are based on some of the theories are not useful. These systems can help the designers to find the specific properties and qualities of precedents more simple. It can be noted that at the end of this process some relative understanding of precedents can be reached which can be in the form of some drawings or written scripts