Design education begins with the student’s embodied experience of the world, yet this foundational aspect often goes unexamined in the development and implementation of design pedagogy. Instructors may take for granted the complexities of learning design, while students grapple with muddled thinking as they navigate unfamiliar methods and concepts. This book reimagines design pedagogy, not as a transfer of abstract knowledge, but as a transformative process rooted in the student’s own sensations, inquiries, and lived experiences.
Drawing on the philosophies of Pallasmaa, Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, and others, this book presents a pedagogy that fosters transformative growth by learning through authentic encounters. By engaging in the immediacy of making, students immerse themselves in heuristic investigations that integrate experimentation, conceptualization, and reflective critique. This approach enables students to internalize knowledge within a transformation of lived experience, cultivating their agency and evolving their mindset as designers.
This book is an essential resource for educators, design instructors, and academic leaders in architecture and design programs. It offers a framework for fostering student transformation and self-development, making it invaluable for those seeking to educate the next generation of designers through experientially embodied learning.
Table of Contents:
Introduction. The Student Beginning to Learn Design Chapter 1. The Predicament of Beginning Design in Architecture Education Chapter 2. Phenomenology and Embodiment as Precursors to Beginning Design Chapter 3. The Experience of Abstraction in Beginning Design Chapter 4. Making as the Point of Entry in Learning Design Chapter 5. Pedagogical Case Studies – Making in Beginning Design Case Study 1. Embodied Approach to Beginning Design (Stephen Temple) Chapter 6. Case Study 2. Design Village: An Embodied Beginning (Michael Lucas) Chapter 7. Case Study 3. Crafting Knowledge (Arief Setiawan) Chapter 8. Conclusion and Implications
About the Author :
Stephen Temple, Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning; University of Texas San Antonio, has degrees from Carnegie-Mellon (1980), University of Texas at Austin (1993), and 10 years in practice and hosted NCBDS (2005). Stephen teaches architectural design, beginning design, and aesthetic theory has over 100 scholarly publications with research investigating architectural design pedagogy and theory, psychology of learning, philosophy of perception, phenomenology, photography, and design/build. Two books, Making Thinking: Beginning Architectural Design Education (2011) and Developing Creative Thinking in Beginning Design (2019) support student self-development and creative thinking. His current scholarship investigates embodied strategies for learning architectural design.
Review :
“A useful review of the important principles behind doing and making as a key to facilitating learning, from John Dewey to Merleau-Ponty, illustrated with case studies where the principles have shaped beginning design projects that engage, energize, and transform students.”
Tim McGinty, AIA, retired and founder of the National Conference on Beginning Design Education (NCBDS) - now in its 42nd year.
"Stephen Temple's Learning through Making in Architectural Design: Realizing Embodied Pedagogy arrives as a long-overdue corrective to a century of abstraction-driven pedagogy. Drawing on phenomenology, developmental learning theory, and the transformative power of making, Temple argues persuasively that the beginning design student's embodied life-experience is not a starting obstacle to overcome but the very ground from which authentic design education must grow. This is a book I have long hoped someone would write; and no one was better positioned to write it than Professor Temple, whose years of teaching, research, and national engagement with beginning design education have uniquely prepared him for this task.
Temple's framing resonates deeply with the work many of us have been advancing for decades: that the 'beginner's mind' -- open, undefended, experientially alive -- is not a deficiency but an extraordinary pedagogical resource. His call to slow down the rush toward building design in order to cultivate the roots of embodied knowing aligns with approaches central to beginning design education. His engagement with Juhani Pallasmaa's vision of architectural education as authentic personal transformation -- that architecture must be 'confronted, experienced and internalized through personal encounter'-- gives that call exactly the pedagogical traction it deserves.
The book's particular authority also rests on the remarkable breadth and rigor of its intellectual foundations. Temple draws on an illustrious range of thinkers -- from William James and John Dewey to bell hooks and José Ortega y Gasset, alongside contemporary neuroscientists, developmental psychologists, and education theorists -- weaving their insights into a coherent and compelling argument for a more humanistic, embodied beginning design pedagogy.
This book is essential reading for anyone who teaches, or cares about, how the next generation of architects begins to find their way."
Julio Bermudez, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Architecture, The Catholic University of America; author of Spirituality in Architectural Education (CUA Press, 2023)
