The Design studio promotes lateral thinking and author-driven building scenarios within a global context of diverse, contradictory, and competing architectural forms. Students are faced with a chasm between environmental responsibilities and innate formalistic tendencies of the profession manifested in the works of architects and starchitects around the world. Educators are further challenged by the need to enhance students’ capacity in working individually and in groups, designing creatively but responding to client/user imperatives, and developing philosophical and avant-garde conceptual constructs, yet staying grounded in engineered systems. In order to meet such challenges, architectural educators need to develop integrated teaching and motivational strategies within which cognitive and affective dimensions can be fused to improve students’ learning outcomes and competencies.

Biography:

Dr Kashef received his Ph.D. in Urban Planning and Design from University of Waterloo. He taught and practiced architecture and urban planning in the United States, Canada, Egypt, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Areas of involvement include design and project management of large-scale developments, urban revitalization, and historic conservation. Research interests are in urban regeneration, suburban retrofitting, and interdisciplinary theory of the built environment.