210 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in PedagogyPreamble
Our students at Portsmouth love digital technology. Much of the time they spend design-
ing is in a virtual world and they are quick to learn how to apply the latest software.
This year we set an experimental project to counterbalance the virtual, and to encourage
students to work in real time and real space. Architecture and Interior Design students
were asked to research their own perception of space working collaboratively with art-
ists, some of whom were disabled. They had two tasks: to create a collaborative perform-
ance, 130 second year students participating with the artists, and to make individual
visual diaries, recording the process, and their own research. There was no restriction
on how they could record and evaluate. Both students and collaborators; artists, dancers
and musicians, found it very energising and a very positive experience.
Project: Space Exploration
Investigating the boundaries and sensory experience of space and building through
movement and mark making, exploring ways that bodies and architectural space
interconnect.
“Every touching experience of architecture is multi-sensory; qualities of matter,
space and scale are measured equally by the eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue, skeleton and
muscle. Architecture involves seven realms of sensory experience which interact and
infuse each other.”^1
History
Last year I was approached to collaborate with disabled artists, to work together and
to document a work, Squaring the Circle, as part of a bid to the UK Arts Council for
a regional award. The bid was successful. The award ceremony took place within the
building that houses the School of Architecture. Part of the ceremony included two
site-specific dance performances. One of them was by Signdance Collective who is
part of the team involved in the project. In September 2006, at a progress meeting,
we were reflecting on how successful the dances had been, and we started to form an
idea for collaborating more thoroughly with the students, using dance and exploring
space through bodily movement, and recording it through drawing movement of the
body in specific spatial contexts. It would provide an interesting platform for discus-
sion both for understanding and perception of space, and of disability issues.
Our educational aims were
- To collaborate with other disciplines and investigate a new relationships with
space. - To explore different perceptions of our surroundings for greater spatial awareness
beyond the visual - To explore ways of embedding an understanding of disability issues through the
body in space