Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design

108 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy

Unlike a lesson, a Design class that we define and organize as a laboratorio (i.e. labo-
ratory) is based on the sharing of both thinking and doing. It implies the presence
into the same room of professor, teaching assistants, students, producing projects,
maquettes, digital models, pictures and drawings.
The main problem of this kind of organization is when the collective experience
makes a shift into a direct relation between teacher (or teaching assistant) and
student in the form of a “confession”. What we mean for “confession” is the secrect,
one-to-one conversation about the project. A situation where everybody just waits,
sometimes a lot, for the moment to talk to the professor or to a teaching assistant,
and then goes home. This kind of approach makes very often classes empty with people
looking only to their own project and not to what others do.
What we found useful in our past experience was on the contrary the shared analy-
sis of single projects. In the past we were used to organize public discussions through
various media, such as the exhibition of printed drawings on the walls and on large
tables, or the video-projection of drawings photocopied on transparent paper.
Our view of the most natural evolution for this kind of approach is the shift into
an open space based on the dynamic features of the world wide web such as the
community portal. (fig. 1)

Fig. 1

A professor making public com-

ments on a student' project

in front of the whole class,

using as reference the course

webportal. Student Katarzyna

Urbanowicz, lab2m 2007