Architectural Design as Educational Strategy "Geometry Oriented"

(Incipit) University geometric education is by tradition considered as a preparatory training in the field of architecture, engineering, and design. Students are normally taught about Geometry (and Graphics) at the beginning of their curricula, and subsequently involved in the use of them in the project activities. Descriptive Geometry is the basic subject matter at the beginning of the training in the abovementioned fields. Sometimes, after these early educational stages, Descriptive Geometry is integrated in the architectural design workshops, where the teacher works side by side with the leading teacher of the workshop on specific projects, but in any case Descriptive Geometry itself is perceived as belonging to the fundamentals of education, and with the advent of CAD systems, and Computer Graphics in general, it has almost disappeared from the courses listed on the University programs. This contribution is about an elective course titled Geometrical Complements of Graphic Representation, proposed and taught by the author at the Politecnico di Milano since the Academic year 2010/2011, where targeted design tasks are used as ‘picklocks’ for getting also advanced students from the master programs interested in Descriptive Geometry.