Environment-behaviour Research and the Teaching of Architecture in the Design Studio: An Experiment in Bahrain

This paper presents an experiment that attempted to incorporate environment-behavior research into teaching architecture. The author was inspired by the ‘Moratuwa Experiment’; a design studio offered by Vidura Sri Nammuni at the University of Moratuwa, which employed ‘architecture as an art’ paradigm. The present experiment employs ‘architecture as place making paradigm’ and demonstrates how such an approach can incorporate environment- behavior research more meaningfully. The paper presents the salient aspects of the experiment and describes the design methodology adopted. It concludes that closer relations should be established between environment-behavior research and theories of architecture to enable social issues to become the generators of architecture.