Effectiveness of teaching primary architecture to public youth and teens (case study: reading architectural facades)

The catastrophic breakup between public realm and architectural society, along with the lack of successful achievement of the postmodern elite attitudes towards the popularization of architecture, has prompted the public to reintroduce architectural education as a necessity not only for architects and architecture students themselves but also for all people. The researchers' experiences indicate that there are potentially active areas for youth and teens to engage in architectural issues that public educations are the most feasible area amongst them. In this study, an elementary experience has been taken to assess the effectiveness of architectural training on teens to deepen their attitude towards architecture. To assess the role of education, people’s common judgment about the elevations of buildings has been used as a tool of inquiry, since elevation alone, is the most visible part of buildings for the public. In the at hand research, different interpretations of building elevations are categorized within six terms so basic elements along with allegorical, behavioral, contextual, memorial and gestalt ordering characteristics are specified as specialized factors. This research is based on participatory picture ordering with semantic differential technique are used as survey to study perception of people about three residential, administrative, and religious uses of various samples. 54 images were used as an evaluation tool in two different categories (City of Damghan local images and scattered building pictures of the whole of Iran) to be sorted due to three architectural functions. Every 18 images were specified for one of the three groups of usages while amongst these 18 pictures, 6 were selected from urban context of Damghan, 6 were chosen from famous recent works of Iranian architects all around the country based on 6 factors of cognitive characteristics of architectural elevation. The other 6 ones were selected from various locations of Iran from more ordinary of less famous buildings amongst architects. Evidence from respondents in Damghan city was considered for assessing teen’s raw mentality. The experimental group was assessed after short-term guidance workshop in the city of Ilam. These workshops were intended as a pilot experience for studying feasibility of public education about a special discourse of architecture. So upon its discovery nature, four proposed types of transferring data to the public were considered: implicit critical debate, explicit critical debate, implicit positive (informational) debate and explicit positive (informational) debate. The results of the field survey and the four proposed training types including implicit and explicit positive debate show that any training could be effective in changing the unique and collective viewpoints of teens towards the goals of architecture and the change in the type of teaching to people brings different directions into public views. It is worth to mention that there were significant differences between the results of our trained people with those who have official architectural education. While there is no considerable content in architectural education about the matter it is not very surprising. The cornerstone of it can be founded in high school textbooks and workshops to accommodate architectural concepts.