CAAD Education under the Lens of Critical Communication Theories and Critical Pedagogy: Towards a Critical Computer Aided Architectural Design Education (CCAADE)

Understanding the dominant ethos of our age is imperative but not easy. However it is quite evident that new technologies have altered our times. Every discipline is now forced to be critical in developing new concepts according to the realities of our times. Implementing a critical worldview and consciousness is now more essential than ever. Latest changes in information technology are creating pressure on change both in societal and cultural terms. With its direct relation to these technologies, computer aided architectural design education, is obviously an outstanding / prominent case within contemporary debate. This paper aims to name some critical points related to computer aided architectural design education (CAADE) from the perspective of critical communication studies and critical education theories. It tries to relate these three areas, by introducing their common concepts to each other. In this way, it hopes to open a path for a language of critique. A critique that supports and promotes experimentation, negotiation, creativity, social consciousness and active participation in architectural education in general, and CAADE in specific. It suggests that CAADE might become critical and produce meta-discourses [1] in two ways. Firstly, by being critical about the context it exists in, that is to say, its relationships to the existing institutional and social structures and secondly by being critical about the content it handles, in other words by questioning its ideological dimensions. This study considers that analysing the role of CAADE in this scheme can provide architectural education with the opportunity to make healthy projections for the future

Theorising a Sustainable Computer Aided Architectural Education Model

The dogmatic structure of architectural education has meant that the production and application of new educational theories, leading to educational models that use computer technology as their central medium of education, is still a relatively under-explored area. Partial models cannot deliver the expected bigger steps, but only bits and pieces. Curricula developments, at many schools of architecture, have been carried out within the closed circuit manner of architectural education, through expanding the traditional curricula and integrating computers into them. There is still no agreed curriculum in schools of architecture, which defines, at least conceptually, the use of computers within it. Do we really know what we are doing? In the words of Aart Bijl,'If I want to know what I am doing, I need a separate description of my doing it, a theory'[Bijl, 1989]. The word'sustainability'is defined as understanding the past and responding to the present with concern for the future. Applying this definition to architectural education, this paper aims to outline the necessity and the principles for the construction of a theory of a sustainable computer aided architectural education model, which could lead to an architectural education that is lasting