Identifying the Challenges and Obstacles of Architectural Students’ Cognitive Perceptions in the Architectural Design Process

Problem statement: Architectural education in Iran is encountering fundamental issues and suffering from weaknesses such as confusion in architectural education spaces in Iran, the lack of a somewhat responsive process to the educational needs of students, and,  the lack of the student’s orientation towards learning architectural design. Unfortunately, in universities, professors pay less attention to the subject of “understanding space,” and the problem is how to teach students to create it without a clear understanding of the nature of space. On the other hand, transferring concepts from a visible state to a spatial one is much simpler than transferring them from a mental, verbal, or written state to a spatial one.

The main goal of this research is to identify the challenges and problems in teaching architectural design, with an emphasis on the mental perception of students.

The present study is considered applied in terms of its purpose and data collection and analysis methods within the qualitative research group. The statistical population of the research includes experts and professors in the field of architecture at the Islamic Azad Universities of Tehran and Karaj. The data collection tool is a semi-structured interview, and ATLAS TI software was used for data coding.

The results led to the identification of 46 core codes, 84 indicators, and 17 final themes, which include issues such as the physical conditions of learning environments, outdated methods and design approaches in Iranian universities, the level of familiarity of architecture professors with modern methods, lack of paradigmatic convergence, one-sidedness in architectural design education, visually-centric space creation, and more. Therefore, it can be said that in the educational and research system of Iranian architecture departments, less attention is paid to “mental perception” and architecture students cannot accurately convey their understanding of the environment using past methods such as simple hand tools, paper, and models and convince their audience of the success of their project. Understanding the environment and its mechanisms plays a key role in expressing the environment.