Research as design process: Integrating methodologies in architectural education

Abstract

This paper presents two consecutive Visiting Unit studios at ETSALS where research was embedded as a driver of the architectural design process. The first, Revaluating Informal Settlements (2nd Term 2021/22), led with Alejandro Haiek, treated informality as a laboratory for visionary urbanism through social cartographies, participatory diagnostics, and bottom‑up proposals in Barcelona’s El Carmel. The second, The Making of a Room (1st Term 2022/23), developed with Ted’A arquitectes, pursued the room as the unit of architecture via a sequence of divertissements and four scalar exercises (landscape, typology, room, element). Together, both studios demonstrate how research methods—operative mapping, typological inquiry, iterative modeling, and constructive analysis—can be structured as a coherent pedagogy that links theory to project, and context to form.