The Design Studio: From a Brief and a Site to a Building

A student is handed two things on the first day: a page of text and a plot of land. The text says, roughly, "a small library for a neighbourhood, 1,800 square metres, a reading room, a children's area, a meeting room, an office". The plot is a corner site, slightly sloping, with a tree on it and a busy road along one side. Nobody says what the building should look like. Nobody could: it does not exist, and there are thousands of buildings that would answer the brief.

Fourteen weeks later the student pins up drawings and a model and defends them to a panel. In between they will have thrown away most of what they made. The studio is where an architecture student learns the one skill the other courses can't give: starting with a vague problem, making something concrete, finding what's wrong with it, and making it again.

The brief is a set of numbers and a few wishes

A brief (or "programme") lists the rooms the client wants and how big they should be. Add the areas and you get the net floor area. But a building also needs corridors, stairs, lifts, toilets, walls and plant rooms. So the gross area is larger, and the ratio of net to gross, the efficiency, is typically around 65 to 85% depending on the building type. A hospital is far less efficient than a warehouse.

The brief meets the site's rules in those few lines. Worked number: 1,800 m² net at 75% efficiency is 2,400 m² gross. On a 2,400 m² site, a 3-storey building has an 800 m² footprint, which is 33% coverage and a floor area ratio of 1.0. If the planning rules allow 50% coverage and a FAR of 1.5, it fits easily. Push the programme to 3,600 m² net and the gross is 4,800 m²: FAR 2.0, over the limit, so the brief itself has to be argued with. Part of the studio's skill is noticing that early. (The coverage and FAR limits here are invented examples. See Urban Design & Planning, 34/95, for how real ones work.)

The wishes matter too: "a place that feels welcoming", "should be open to the street". A good studio asks the student to write down what the brief is really asking, and to say which of its demands conflict. Many do.

The site speaks first

Before drawing a wall, students walk the site: where the sun is at noon, where the wind comes from, what the neighbours look like, where people will arrive from, what the ground is like. This is why "the site" comes before "the idea" in most studios. A good building answers a particular place.

One of the oldest site facts is the sun. The tilt of the Earth's axis means the sun's noon height changes through the year: at latitude φ on a day when the sun's declination is δ, the noon sun stands at 90° − |φ − δ| above the horizon. Declination swings between about +23.4° in June and −23.4° in December. At 40° N that makes the noon sun 73.4° high at the June solstice and 26.6° high at the December one.

A horizontal overhang above a window turns that into a design move. An overhang of depth d shades a window of height h at noon when d × tan(sun height) is at least h. For a 1.5 m window at 40° N, shading it fully on 21 June takes only 0.45 m. In December, the same overhang of 0.45 m shades just a sliver, so the low winter sun walks into the room. The same simple device gives shade in summer and warmth in winter, on the side of the building facing the equator. It is not magic: on east and west facades the sun is low at the wrong times, and vertical fins or shutters work better. Vernacular builders in many hot climates worked this out long before the equations, with deep eaves, verandas and courtyards.

Every move costs something: massing

Once the site and the numbers are in hand, the student blocks out massing: where the volume goes, how tall, how deep. Every massing choice trades one thing against another, and the point of the exercise is to see the trade clearly.

Take 3,000 m² of floor. Spread over two floors it is a wide, shallow footprint, with lots of roof and plenty of edge for windows. Stack it in four floors and the footprint is small and compact, with less exterior wall and roof per square metre of floor: easier to heat and cheaper to wrap. But as a building gets deeper, the middle is far from any window. A common rule of thumb is that daylight does useful work only about 5 to 6 m inside a window wall, so a bar deeper than about 12 m, daylit from both sides, has a core that needs electric light.

Worked number: 3,000 m² in four floors of 3.5 m, 15 m deep and 50 m long, has 1,820 m² of wall and 750 m² of roof, 2,570 m² of envelope, with 80% of the floor within 6 m of a window. Make it 25 m deep and 30 m long: envelope drops to 2,290 m², but only 48% of the floor is daylit. No answer is right. A library may want deep calm reading rooms, a school classrooms with light on two sides.

Iteration beats the first idea

Studios push students to make many options. There is research behind the habit, and a lot of folklore. Architecture's case is that a design problem is "wicked" (a term from Rittel and Webber, 1973): you can't understand it fully until you try a solution, and each try changes what you think the problem is. The designer and theorist Bryan Lawson reported in the 1970s that architecture students tended to learn the problem by proposing solutions, where science students analysed first. Donald Schön described the studio coach as helping a student have a "conversation with the situation": make a move, see what it says back, then move again.

There is also a trap. Jane Darke wrote in 1979 that designers often seize on an early "primary generator", a single strong idea, and then spend the project making it fit. That is efficient, and it can be a trap if the idea is mediocre. The remedy is cheap: sketch several and compare before you fall in love.

The simulation below is a toy, not evidence about studios. A "design" is a point on a line; its quality is a landscape with several peaks of different heights; each try costs one evaluation. One strategy commits to the first idea and polishes it. The other spends a quarter of its tries on different starting ideas, keeps the best, and polishes that. With five peaks and 60 tries, the committed designer ends at about 81% of the best available, the explorer at about 96%. With a single smooth peak and many tries, they tie, because there is only one hill to climb.

The crit: arguing with drawings

The studio's central ritual is the crit (critique, or "review"). A student pins up drawings and models, explains the idea in a few minutes, and then tutors, visiting critics and classmates respond. There are desk crits (one to one, a few times a week), interim reviews and a final jury. The tradition has deep roots. The nineteenth-century École des Beaux-Arts in Paris trained architects in ateliers under a master, with students rushing to finish drawings before a deadline, a scene that gave English the phrase "en charrette" (the story is that a cart collected the drawings). The Bauhaus, founded in Weimar in 1919, swapped the atelier for workshops and a common foundation course. Today's studio is a descendant of both.

What is the crit for? Defenders give three reasons. A drawing can only be judged by someone looking at it, so the feedback is concrete. It teaches students to explain a design and to defend it with reasons, which is half of what architects do with clients. And it lets them see how many answers one brief can get. A good crit asks questions rather than giving verdicts: what is the first thing a visitor sees? what is this wall for? where does the rain go?

Because the building is never finished in the studio, the question is always "does this hold together?", the quality the NAAB calls design synthesis. A strong project has an idea, a response to the site, a plan that works, structure that makes sense (34/64), a skin that keeps out weather (34/93), light and air that suit the room (34/94), and a way to build it (34/70). It need not look like anything in particular. Francis Kéré's primary school in Gando, Burkina Faso (built from 2001), is often cited for answering a tight budget, local clay and a hot climate with a raised roof for ventilation; schools around the world teach it as a case where brief, site and construction line up.

Studio culture, and its critics

The studio has been criticised, loudly and for decades, by students, teachers and professional bodies. Honest accounts name the complaints. Long hours and all-nighters before deadlines are treated as a badge of commitment. Sleep and health suffer. A harsh crit can humiliate a student in public, and who feels welcome in the room is not equal: critics have raised gender, race and class. Studio costs materials, plotting and software, and students with money have an edge. And the habit prepares students for a profession where long unpaid or underpaid hours are common, which some say it trains in instead of challenging.

In December 2002 the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS) published The Redesign of Studio Culture, from a task force, calling for written policies on the culture of studios. NAAB made that a condition of accreditation in the mid-2000s (sources date it 2004 or 2005), and the AIAS followed with Toward an Evolution of Studio Culture in 2008. Around 2019 to 2020 the term was widened to "learning and teaching culture". Many schools now have policies on hours, respectful critique and sleep.

Defenders reply that the intensity of the studio is part of how people learn to design: making, failing and remaking cannot be crammed, and working next to classmates teaches as much as the teacher does. Critics reply that intensity and overwork are different things, and that the best studios show you can have a high bar without the cost. Both sides agree that the studio's method, not its worst habits, is what matters, and the argument is about which parts of the culture are the method. Nobody has settled it.

What a graduate just sees

• A brief is a list of rooms plus a gross-up for corridors and walls, and the first test is whether it fits the site and its rules.
• The site comes first: the sun's height, the wind, the street and the neighbours shape the building before any wall is drawn.
• A fixed overhang can shade a window in summer and let the winter sun in, because the noon sun's height changes by about 47° over the year at mid-latitudes.
• Every massing choice trades compactness against daylight, and there is no answer without a use.
• The first idea is rarely the best; making several options early is cheaper than fixing one late.
• A crit is a conversation about a drawing, and a good one asks questions.
• "Does it hold together?" is the test: idea, site, plan, structure, skin, comfort and construction in one.
• The studio method has real critics, and a fair account includes their case.

Where it shows up next

• Construction Management (34/70): a design only becomes a building when someone can sequence it, price it and build it.
• Business Law & Ethics (34/55): the architect's duties to client and public, and who pays when it goes wrong.
• Urban Design & Planning (34/95): the first drawing of any project is the plot and its rules.
• The real world: an architectural office, a developer's feasibility study, a self-build project, and every renovation where someone has to turn a brief into a plan.

If you want to go deeper

• 📘 Textbook: Francis D.K. Ching, Architecture: Form, Space, and Order (Wiley, 5th ed. 2023): the standard first-year visual text for thinking in space.
• 📘 Textbook: Bryan Lawson, How Designers Think (Routledge): a readable study of how designers work, across several editions.
• 📘 Gentler: Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner (1983), on professionals who learn by doing, with the architecture studio as a central case.
• ▶️ Free course: MIT OpenCourseWare 4.112 Architecture Design Fundamentals I: Nano-Machines (Fall 2012), an undergraduate studio with its project briefs; other OCW studios include 4.101 and 4.104.
• 🌐 Easier first read in this library: How to Read a Building (08/10) and Engineering Drawing & CAD (34/18).