Spatial Abilities of Architects
“How do architects ‘think and design space’?” An interdisciplinary investigation upon architects spatial knowledge, spatial ability and the possibilities for pedagogical improvements in architectural education. This SNF-funded project is a collaborative project together with the Institut Urban Landscape, ZHAW and the Chair for Research on Learning and Instruction, ETH Zurich. The research project pursues one fundamental question: “how do architects think about space?” It builds upon the (yet unproven) assumption that architects have high spatial abilities and spatial knowledge, and asks what the nature of these abilities is. To answer this, we will study spatial abilities among architecture students both developmentally – throughout their academic education – and in comparison to non-architecture students. Furthermore, we will distinguish between general spatial abilities, as typically studied in cognitive and educational psychology, and architecture-specific spatial abilities. For this we will develop a set of new test items that will tap spatial problems we believe are essential to the architects’ work, and are related to the quality of its outcome: “good” architecture. We will also examine how changes to standard architectural teaching methods may improve spatial-specific knowledge of young architects.
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