The paper addresses the shift in architectural education regarding the need to develop new approaches in teaching methodology, improve curricula, and make advancements in new learning arenas and digital environments. The research is based on the assumption that online workshops could offer a unique learning experience for students in higher education. Accordingly, workshops are considered an essential element in teaching emergency design. As a result, this can produce broader and more innovative solutions to COVID-19 challenges regarding social distancing, limited movements, regulated use of public space, and suspended daily activities. The theoretical notions of emergency design and education for sustainable design enabled the identification of research perspectives and spatial levels to be taken as a starting point of the workshop “COVID-19 Challenges: Architecture of Pandemic” that was conducted by the University of Belgrade—Faculty of Architecture in April 2020. The critical review of the workshop’s procedural and substantial aspects led to identifying four main COVID-19 design challenges perceived in performance, innovation, alteration, and inclusion. Additionally, the paper’s findings concern the identification of learning potentials and limitations arising from a current topic affecting global society, for which neither solutions nor adequate answers in the field of architecture and urbanism have been found.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the realm of values upon which thoughts on architecture have been conceived, through the drawings of architectural detail. Although modernism, which opposes technical detail and ornament, is still regarded as influential theoretical position, it neglects to address a broader meaning of a detail in architecture. The research disputes the opposition between an ornament and a technical detail, claiming that a detail in architecture is the more abstract term, which represents a certain level of design thought besides utility and embellishment. It is argued that both modern and traditional values from different aspects of societal and cultural activities, as for their changes were being referenced to the micro level of architecture, transforming the way of their presence through different visual representations of detail along the history and theory of profession. In this paper, the small-scale drawings are used as a medium a medium which reflects transdisciplinarity of the profession and its entanglement with the knowledge and dynamics of other fields of human activity such as philosophy, economy, religion, engineering, and arts.

The research discusses the phenomenology of drawing details in architecture, approaching the drawings as a medium that carries poetic and technical aspects of architectural design and building. With digital technology advancements, a whole new set of terms and practices appeared that can be related to the changed notion of detailing in architecture. Addressing the problem of translation of architectural concepts into material practice, the research proposes a method for decoding the aspects of poetics of construction by overcoming the conventional representation techniques related to construction drawing, and introduces the combination of methods of interpretative 3D modelling and digital assemblage. By using tectonic theory as a theoretical framework, the research aims to define a new post-tectonic standpoint that can offer a unique perspective on the relation between design process, production and representation in architecture in the current moment. The new perspective outlines the poetical protocols in individual conceptual narratives of the selected authors, approaching the details in their work as a form of representational discursive images that could be interpreted as a microscale of macro ideas in the field of architectural design. The method of research is interpretative modelling that combines the analogue and digital techniques, and analytical drawings of the examples related to the discussed topic. By combining the digital and analogue approach, the aim is to offer a new perspective in the form of the dialectical model for interpretation of architectural detail that could offer new insights into contemporary tectonic discourse through which variant states of the poetical and technical design thinking could be decoded.