Architectural Design Translation: Integrating Design and Technology in Timber Education

One of the challenges facing contemporary architectural education is implementing teaching approaches that can enhance students’ design skills and technical proficiency in a context that addresses the climate emergency. This paper presents a design translation approach that aims to strengthen the synergies between design and construction technology while introducing sustainable building materials, such as mass timber, into the curriculum. In this approach, students select a house designed by a renowned architect and reinterpret it through the lens of a new mass timber construction system. The paper analyses a design studio case study in which the approach was applied over two consecutive iterations, assessing the process, student work and official course evaluations. The findings suggest that this approach fosters a more nuanced understanding of conceptual design intent, social context, and sustainable construction technology with mass timber. Nevertheless, the study highlights the importance of targeted input from experts in deepening technical rigor, and suggests that interdisciplinary collaboration between architecture and civil engineering students could lead to further improvement. The approach can also be adapted to other design contexts, offering an open framework for integrating sustainable materials into a more holistic design education.