Learning through Making in Architectural Design

“A useful review of the important principles behind doing and making as a key to facilitating learning, from John Dewey to Merleau-Ponty, illustrated with case studies where the principles have shaped beginning design projects that engage, energize, and transform students.”

Tim McGinty, AIA, retired and founder of the National Conference on Beginning Design Education (NCBDS) - now in its 42nd year.

"Stephen Temple's Learning through Making in Architectural Design: Realizing Embodied Pedagogy arrives as a long-overdue corrective to a century of abstraction-driven pedagogy. Drawing on phenomenology, developmental learning theory, and the transformative power of making, Temple argues persuasively that the beginning design student's embodied life-experience is not a starting obstacle to overcome but the very ground from which authentic design education must grow. This is a book I have long hoped someone would write; and no one was better positioned to write it than Professor Temple, whose years of teaching, research, and national engagement with beginning design education have uniquely prepared him for this task.

Temple's framing resonates deeply with the work many of us have been advancing for decades: that the 'beginner's mind' -- open, undefended, experientially alive -- is not a deficiency but an extraordinary pedagogical resource. His call to slow down the rush toward building design in order to cultivate the roots of embodied knowing aligns with approaches central to beginning design education. His engagement with Juhani Pallasmaa's vision of architectural education as authentic personal transformation -- that architecture must be 'confronted, experienced and internalized through personal encounter'-- gives that call exactly the pedagogical traction it deserves.

The book's particular authority also rests on the remarkable breadth and rigor of its intellectual foundations. Temple draws on an illustrious range of thinkers -- from William James and John Dewey to bell hooks and José Ortega y Gasset, alongside contemporary neuroscientists, developmental psychologists, and education theorists -- weaving their insights into a coherent and compelling argument for a more humanistic, embodied beginning design pedagogy.

This book is essential reading for anyone who teaches, or cares about, how the next generation of architects begins to find their way."

Julio Bermudez, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Architecture, The Catholic University of America; author of Spirituality in Architectural Education (CUA Press, 2023)