Teaching Structural Design to Architecture Students: A Case Study on Footbridge Design Exercise for Undergraduate Students

This paper represents an action research-based inductive teaching approach to structural design to architecture students through a given task of freestyle footbridge design. The objective is to educate undergraduate architecture students about the basic understanding of structural systems and their integration into design through the appropriate choices of materials based on their structural and architectural qualities. The main aim was to convey the importance of a collaborative design approach from the early design stage and during the design progress. For this reason, an architect needs to have a basic understanding and logic of structures. This paper highlights the different classifications of structural systems so that students can have a basic idea of structural typologies that can fit with their design vision. Students were given two routes to design the footbridge. One is the ‘form-making’ approach, through which they can come up with the bridge design form based on the context and design concept and then select an appropriate structural system to develop the final design. This is a linear process. Another is the ‘form-finding’ approach, through which students will first set the structural conditions and restrictions and then find suitable force-based forms either by physical model testing or digital tools. Here, some sample footbridge designs of ‘form-making’ and ‘form-finding’ are represented.