This work falls within the empirical studies of design activity. Its project is to understand Le Corbusier's designing way and how does he work and structure his design processes. Doing so, it jumps above the descriptive and doctrinal knowledge of objects produced by “Le Corbusier” to study the actions and mechanisms that led to them.To achieve its aim, this study uses genetic method, developed by P.M. De Biasi of literary origin, this research method is made of three stages. The first one, which is of empirical nature, is one of data gathering. It leads to the establishment of genesis tables and to the classification of the all collected documents. The second stage, makes the analysis of all the collected documents one by one. It allows the restitution of the creative process of one projects “Le Corbusier” which is “la chapelle de Notre Dame du haut de Ronchamp”. The last stage is finally that define the design processe of the this project. The results show that the design activity of “Le Corbuiser” obeys the overall logic of one generic model which may be called his individual designing style.

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Among the increasing number of researches about design thinking, several studies, empirically investigate the report between design process and different sources of inspiration. Visualization of Images represents one of the most current stimuli in the architectural design.This work focuses on the link between the active part of design process and images of precedents when visualized by the designer at the beginning of his design activity. It aims to identify and measure the impact of such visualization on the cognitive process of ideation.We use the protocol analysis method. Data are collected through design experiment and coded by the semio-morphic coding scheme. Results show that the visualization of images of precedents enhances the productivity of the ideation process. The process consistency is also improved by the apearence of homogeneous phases. Moreover the ideation process becomes more creative cognitively, by making the genesis of primitive chains of actions faster, easier and similar.Accordingly, this paper communicate the effect of a common practice such images’ visualization on the architectural design process to get insight on the cognitive befits of this practice.

This piece of work is concerned with how shapes are generated, explored and transformed during the architectural designing process. It postulates that the relations and connections between sketches, produced during the design activity, can be defined in terms of shape transformations and described according to a closed list of shape operators. These latters provide a formal description of the shape exploration process and allow a deep understanding of its logic. To achieve its goal, this study creates a model to describe the different shape transformations, performed by designers, during the sketching activity.

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