Structural Mapping of Architectural Exemplars

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Professor, School of Architecture and Environmental Design, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran

2 Ph.D. Candidate, School of Architecture and Environmental Design, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Once designers start to create a new design idea, they often become particularly influenced by the sources of inspiration and examples. Sources of inspiration may have dual effect on design outcome; they can enhance design quality or lead to non-creative ideas. There is a mapping process between source and design idea. Structural mapping enhance design quality, repetition of precedent elements or features leads to literal or superficial mapping. With the aim of better understanding the true mapping process, three questions were raised. What is the difference between inspiration and copying? How can the type of the example affect the mapping process? Are architecture students able to perform structural mapping of architectural exemplars? For understanding the difference between inspiration and copying, we must recognize structural mapping and design fixation. Structural mapping literature indicated that the relations between objects rather than attributes of them are mapped from source to target, the relations are abstracted before mapping, transformation for adaptation to the subject happens, patterns rather than forms and features are considered, and the outcomes of structural mapping lead to the good quality and creativity of design, appropriate reuse of features, and incremental design improvement. In this paper, with the aim of recognizing the relation between the type of source and the type of mapping, an empirical research has been performed. Totally, 54 participants (architecture students at different levels of undergraduate programs) were given four types of exemplars, i.e. contemporary with same function, contemporary with different function, historical with similar function, and historical with different function. The type of similarity between source and design idea were scored in four types, i.e. structural, superficial, literal and irrelevant by three experts. This paper explores two propositions; (1) the exemplars with same functions lead to structural mapping, while those different functions lead to superficial and literal mapping; and (2) Iranian historical exemplars lead to structural mapping, while the contemporary ones lead to superficial and literal mapping. In this paper, we used SPSS software for performing all statistical tests, and drawing tables and charts. The chi-square test was used to test the significance of relation between variables. Findings demonstrate that some of designers used structural mapping, while most of them tended to derive superficial features from sources. The findings indicate that there is a significant relation between source categories and the type of similarity between source and outcome. The exemplars of Iranian architecture led to more structural mapping than foreign contemporary examples. Therefore the second proposition has been confirmed but findings cannot confirm the first proposition. Due to limitations of the research such as sample size and lack of comparable research on historical exemplars, we cannot certainly conclude about the differences between the types of exemplars, and there is a need for more future researches on this issue. Participants used superficial mapping more than other types of mapping; therefore architecture education must enhance student’s structural mapping capacity. How can the architecture education enhance the student’s structural mapping capacity? The future researches must be performed to answer this question.

Keywords

References

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Journal of Architecture and Urban Planning
Volume 10, Issue 19
December 2017
Pages 5-22

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