The uses of precedent: the construction of architectural repertoire inside the pedagogical environment of the design studio

This paper discusses the use of exemplary solutions as design criteria, focusing the pedagogical practice of architecture in undergraduate design studios. The construction of architectural knowledge through design implies the use of precedents both as models to be adopted as a starting point ( open to adaptive manipulations), and as comparative tools for a posteriori typological verification and correction of design decisions leading to parti configurations. The description, interpretation and transformation of types as part of an "imitative" approach to the architectural project is the main subject of an epistemology of practice as suggested by Donald Schon, and supports the exercise of compositional invention. In this perspective, figurative imagination is intertwined with a collective catalogue of paradigmatic works of architecture, which becomes a set of elective constraints progressively incorporated to the practitioner's repertoire.