Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design

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

It is quite obvious in a contemporary creative work in architecture and town planning,
that a design office can be remote from an actual building site several thousands
of kilometers and information highway substitutes the necessity to move in space
and time. Sophisticated IT can replace direct sensual perception or compensate its
imperfection in many cases. It’s possible to obtain photos of the building site from
satellites, precious maps elaborated by digital technologies, computer 3D models of
terrain and adjacent surroundings. Thanks to those technological achievements there
is low probability to repeat the case of the American town San Francisco, famous of
creating roads with precipitous gradient, the consequence of adopting a checkerboard
layout of American cities not taking into account hilly topography of the site. To
avoid repeating this mistake we prepare our students to obtain appropriate informa-
tion from the Internet, to evaluate and use the information and to communicate with
clients, partners or contractors in remote areas. For this purpose we have introduced
the virtual design studios and common projects with partner schools from abroad.
Some examples are described in this paper.

The Virtual Design Studio

The virtual studio enables long distance cooperation and consultation during the studio
work. It does not matter where the student is at the moment. If the project details are
digitally adjusted and accessible through Internet for pedagogical process, students and
professors can virtualy communicate and consult their work on the various stages of
elaboration, present it online via videoconferencing tools and data transfer. The virtual
design studio focuses on facilitating collaborative work for geographically distributed
design teams, using CAD and electronic communication technologies, in particular the
Internet. Remote collaborative work using the virtual design studio analogue has been
carried out in co-operation with partners at three other European architecture schools:
the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Technology, Bratislava, Slovakia, the
Faculty of Architecture at the University of Technology Graz, Austria, and the Faculty
of Architecture at the University of Technology, Vienna, Austria.
The core notion of the virtual design studio analogue is that of remote design
collaboration facilitated by Internet communication technologies. Students at four
European universities participated in the projects described here. The work presented
is in its essence collaborative, and was co-ordinated by the following members of
academic staff at the participating institutions:
Igor Kosco and Juraj Furdik – University of Technology, Bratislava,
Wolfgang Dokonal and Annegrete Hohmann – University of Technology, Graz,
Adrian Dobson – University of Luton, Bob Martens – University of Technology,
Vienna

Project BRAGRALU (BRAtislava, GRAz, LUton) – Baily Hill Water Tower Conversion,
Luton, 1995

The initial prototype project linked students at the University of Technology, Bra-
tislava, the University of Technology, Graz, and the University of Luton. The project