Architecture as Pedagogy

Architectural Studio 2, Azad Univeristy of Mashhad, Iran, 2019

Unit and Studio Coordinator: Dr. Ali javid

This gallery showcases my student projects developed in a design studio 2 at Azad Univeristy of Mashhad that foregrounded the architectural model not as a representational afterthought, but as the primary site of inquiry. The brief called for the design of an underground gallery, and students were asked to initiate their proposals solely through sectional models—constructing spatial and conceptual ideas directly through physical form rather than plan or elevation. Final drawings were extracted from the models, not for them, reversing conventional hierarchies of representation.

The studio argues that models are not mere instruments of communication but autonomous objects of thought. These projects reflect that ethos: they treat models as epistemic devices—tools for discovery, for fictional speculation, and for generating unforeseen architectural possibilities. Rather than attempting to reproduce an idealized future reality, these models embrace material abstraction, ambiguity, and incompleteness as means to stimulate imagination and critical interpretation.

In this pedagogical framework, making becomes thinking. The model operates between artifact and concept, between structure and story. As students explored light, movement, occupation, and form through physical construction, they also confronted the conceptual tension between the real and the imagined—between architecture as it is, and as it might be.