Flexibility; a critical concern in concept development in the early stages of architectural design process (case study: universities in Tehran)

Academic design pedagogy in the early stages of design is crucial and complicated. The complicated stems from the diverse aspect of architectural design. The world of values, opinions, and ideas begins the architectural design process, and junior architecture students strive to express their ideas in the language of architectural forms. Transforming and actually translating ideas into form is one of the biggest challenges that juniors face. According to the experience of preliminary design studio 3, the concept phase as a translation or transition stage from idea to form and flexibility as a basic approach were investigated in this phase. In this research, three methods used by junior architecture students in three design studios were compared with each other. The results of the pretest–posttest methodology demonstrated that only 15% of students in Studio A, who utilized the two-step process (idea-form) were able to create the desired form, while 55% of students in Studio B (idea-concept-form) and 95% of students in Studio C (idea-flexibility in concept-form) successfully achieved it. The comparison of the three processes shows that the three-phases process, which used the flexibility approach in the concept phase to develop the idea and create the form, is the most efficient method in the early stages of architectural design for architectural juniors.