Abstract :
Architectural education needs to incorporate the available means to acquire the necessary skills for the practical field and develop them. Architectural criticism is a significant skill that could help the student to learn the architectural design. Most of architectural criticism courses relay on the theoretical teaching in isolation from the practical application and the architectural design process. This study is concerned with integrating the teaching of architectural criticism with the development of architectural design skills an assess the effect of this in improve the students’ design skills. In this regard, the paper develops an effective framework to teach architectural criticism. The presented framework integrates several strategies such as introducing theoretical background, group discussion, teamwork and competition-based project. The proposed framework has been implemented on the third-year students in the architectural department in Nile higher institute of engineering and technology, Mansoura, Egypt. The conducted experiment reveals that the practicing of criticism in the classroom could increase students’ capabilities in architectural design. The evaluation of the experiment based on students’ assessment questionnaire covering different stages of the framework. Based on this evaluation some amendments have been recommended to improve the framework and formulate the final version of the course framework. The evaluation and discussion of the results could improve a cohesive architectural criticism curriculum and teaching framework.