An effective architectural criticism teaching framework link and enhance design skills

 Architectural education needs to incorporate the available means to  acquire the necessary skills for the practical field and develop them.  Architectural criticism is a significant skill that could help the student to  learn the architectural design. Most of architectural criticism courses relay  on the theoretical teaching in isolation from the practical application and  the architectural design process. This study is concerned with integrating  the teaching of architectural criticism with the development of  architectural design skills an assess the effect of this in improve the  students’ design skills. In this regard, the paper develops an effective  framework to teach architectural criticism. The presented framework  integrates several strategies such as introducing theoretical background,  group discussion, teamwork and competition-based project. The proposed  framework has been implemented on the third-year students in the  architectural department in Nile higher institute of engineering and  technology, Mansoura, Egypt. The conducted experiment reveals that the  practicing of criticism in the classroom could increase students’  capabilities in architectural design. The evaluation of the experiment  based on students’ assessment questionnaire covering different stages of  the framework. Based on this evaluation some amendments have been  recommended to improve the framework and formulate the final version  of the course framework. The evaluation and discussion of the results  could improve a cohesive architectural criticism curriculum and teaching  framework.