They could follow in the steps of Louis Kahn: 

In every thing that nature makes, nature records how it was made. In the rock is a record of how the rock was made. In man is a record of how man was made.  When we are conscious of this, we have a sense of the laws of the universe. Some can reconstruct the laws of the universe from knowing just a blade of grass.^[21] 

Kahn accepted that one could observe existing things (models) and draw from them laws or rules which brought them into being. But this was for things that already were, and needed to be understood. For things which did not yet exist, understanding had to be reached in a different way.  

The inspirations of man are the beginnings of his work.^[22]

Rather than use an existing construct as the starting point for his architecture, Kahn chose to plum the well of intuition - intending to do this by avoiding an analysis of what physically existed and grasping instead for a conceptualization of what could be. He related an experience as a teacher:  

The problem was a monastery.

We began by assuming no monastery existed up to now.

We had to forget the word monk, the word refectory, the word chapel, the word cell.

For two weeks we did nothing.^[23]

They drew nothing, but they searched in those two weeks for what Kahn called the spirit of the monastery - its type. It was not to be found by abstracting it from monasteries already created, but by laboring through thought to the meaning, the source, the realization that had led to the creation of the very idea of the monastery. 

...Then an Indian girl said: I believe the cell is the most important element of this community and it gives the right for the chapel to exist, and the chapel gives the right for the refectory to exist, and the retreat is also given by the cell and that the workshops are all made by the right of the cell.^[24]

According to John Lobell, Kahn, in his words and his work conducted "one of the deepest and most sustained investigations into absolute being ever undertaken by an individual mind…Kahn constantly sought beginnings, which he liked to call 'Volume Zero'."^[25] It is ironic that in this exercise, under Kahn’s tutelage, after nearly two weeks of deliberation the students were brought back to the very elements they had denied. But this irony was the master’s purpose, for in the end the students were not talking of a cell like the one at La Tourette, or a chapel like the one at Assisi. They were talking of the cell, the chapel, the refectory - of the ideas that served as origins for these things. They recited Volume Zero. They were talking of types. 

I am sure that if a program of requirements was given first in this problem, no such thought will come to the class.

The nucleus of the very first monastery was not a loss but new realizations came to it by reconsidering the spirit of the monastery.

It is for this reason my interest in this nucleus, in form realization, form meaning, the realization of inseparable parts of something.^[26]

A great work of architecture has about it a sense of universal relevance , a timeless appeal that allows it to be appreciated in an almost spiritual way, by all people. It truly belongs to the ages.  There is about such a piece of work a sort of deep level structural gratification, which seems to strike with a multiplied intensity at some long-forgotten sensory apparatus.  It is attraction at an almost abstract level – a tug at something innately and uniquely human.

According to C.J. Jung, there are certain fundamental ideal structural frameworks, which are universal and immutable. He describes these as archetypes and suggests they are psychic remnants, or primeval images that, as part of a great collective unconscious, are subject to conscious representation, but always remain in themselves mere tendencies to form such representations. Though the actual manifestation, Jung notes, "can vary a great deal in detail,"^[27] the expression of its basic pattern calls forth a much more pronounced human reaction than would ordinarily be warranted. "The mind," says Arthur Koestler, "responds like a tuning fork to a pure tone.^[28]

Koestler suggests that the root of the aesthetic experience may spring from the universal ARCHETYPOS.  If so, the archetypological search for origins, their meaning, and their expression may be a path to creating quality in architecture. It is a search undertaken by very few before Louis Kahn's time, and by no one seriously, since. 

...Still he was driven to find a more perfect expression until the whole came together and stood gleaming in the sun like a pyramid: a perfect form, new in that it had never been before, but eternal in that its form was inevitable.^[29]