The Form-making Preferences Among Architectural Students In Their Design Processes

As a core step in the architectural design procedure, the form-making depicts thearchitect’s mental process on creating an architectural conceptual form. Throughout thehistory, a great number of well-known architects show various tendencies towardsform-making in their design process. Such tendencies are called form-makingpreferences. In this article, systematic discoveries and researches on architects’form-making preferences are conducted. By reviewing the key arguments which talkabout form-making process in architectural theory and design methodology, the authorsummarizes three independent scales about form-making preferences, namelysubjective-objective scale, representational-symbolic scale and interpretive-operationalscale. These three scales constitute the tridimensional hypothesis of form-makingpreference. The author then tests the tridimensional hypothesis among213architecturestudents in School of Architecture, Tsinghua University, using self-designed researchmethods. The testing results support the tridimensional hypothesis. Furthermore, theauthor also inquires the possible reasons that may have affections on the students’form-making preferences. At the end of the article, the author gives a critical reflectionon the current architectural education in China in terms of form-making preferences andproposes the idea of humancentric-materialcetric-integrated architectural training mode.