PROGRAMMING, PROBLEM AND SYNTHESIS OF THE ARCHITECTURAL PROJECT: An analysis of the End-of-Studies Projects of professional master’s degrees in Architecture in Brazil
Design problems. Architectural programming. Architectural program. Professional master’s degrees.
The development of a project, as well as the construction of a building, are complex tasks and require the architect to have certain control over all the activities involved in the process. Therefore, understanding the architectural program as a guiding element for design decisions, as well as the results of various investigations into the needs, available budget and users' desires and intentions, allows the designer to expand their perceptions and the possibilities of solutions in the addressing project issues. The program and the delimitation of problems are implemented in the architectural programming stage. This context converged with the general objective of the research, which aims to analyze how the formulation of design problems occurs in the completion works of Brazilian professional master's degrees (in Architecture and/or Urbanism and/or Landscaping), in the light of programming and the architectural program. It is based on the hypothesis that the construction of problems, in the design process, occurs intuitively and through an in-depth analysis of the context in which the project will be inserted, without necessarily using programming methods as a basis. To achieve the objectives, the research is divided into two axes of approach, the first uses qualitative analysis of texts as a methodological strategy – how the author of each work positions themselves in relation to architectural programming, the program and the problems (analysis). The second axis is dedicated to the qualitative analysis of the project, aiming to understand how it responds to problems. The panorama observed in the first axis of the research demonstrates that the majority of Brazilian professional master's degree production does not mention or use programming methods, however, they use many theoretical-conceptual bases and consider several constraints to formulate problems. With regard to the pilot study carried out in just one of the final works, it was observed that the construction of problems is not limited to predominantly functional aspects and there are numerous relationships visualized between the problems and the answers given by the architectural project, so that a solution addresses more than one problem and each problem can have more than one type of solution. The observed facts corroborate the understanding that designing is a systemic and cyclical activity and each of the decisions taken by the architect interferes in the whole, in the architectural project.