Project Method

Origins in Europe

Historically, the project method emerged in 1577 when master builders founded the Accademia di San Lucca in Rome to advance their social standing by developing their profession into a science and to improve the education of their apprentices by offering lessons in the theory and history of architecture, mathematics, geometry, and perspective. To bridge the gap between theory and practice, science and reality, the architects subsequently expanded their repertoire beyond teacher-centered methods and [Page 666]transferred their daily work of designing buildings from the studio to the academy so that the students acquired, through learning by doing and simulating real-life situations, already at school the experience and dexterity they later needed as professionals. These beginnings indicate that the project method—like the experiment of the scientist, the case study of the lawyer, and the sandbox exercise of the staff officer—has its origin in the academization of a profession and that the concept of teaching by projects is not the result of abstract philosophical deliberations, for instance, of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Froebel, or John Dewey, but of practical thinking of vocational education teachers who tried to activate their students’ minds and make their training interesting, lively, and, as far as possible, authentic and useful.

It took, however, more than 150 years and the transfer from Italy to France before project work evolved from a sporadic and voluntary event for few people to a recurring and compulsory part of the curriculum for all students. Indeed, it was only in 1763 that the advanced students of the Académie Royale d’Architecture in Paris regularly got design problems (now known as projets) to demonstrate that they were fit to apply the principles of composition and construction they had previously learned. From the start, the project method served two functions: first, to supplement the bookish and theoretical training of the students and, second, to test their artistic and practical capabilities. In fact, the most difficult, and most cherished, part of the final examination the French students of architecture and, since 1829, students of engineering (at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufacture) had to cope with was the imaginative design of fountains, churches, and palaces; of turbines, cranes, and bridges.

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