Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design

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

Project BRAGRALUWI (BRAtislava, GRAz, LUton, WIen)

For the second collaborative virtual studio project, carried out during the second

semester of the 1995-96 academic year, a group of students from the Faculty of Archi-

tecture at the University of Technology, Vienna joined the network. The re-use of four

nineteenth century brick gasometers in Vienna (fig. 2) was selected as the vehicle for

the project. Small groups of four to five students were formed, every group having at

least one participant at each of the other institutions in the network. The aim in this

project was to develop team solutions, by collaboration between students at different

centres, rather than individual solutions being produced at each centre.

Students had free access to the necessary electronic communication software,

including email, FTP (file transfer protocol) and web browsers. As well as working

on their own solutions, exchanging information between themselves, each team was

required to post “work in progress” onto a web site acting as a virtual notice board,

located on a server at the University of Technology, Vienna. Contextual information

about the buildings was posted on the virtual notice board, and students in Vienna

produced a digital model of the gasometers, which could be downloaded from the

Vienna server.

For this project desktop video conferencing^1 and electronic whiteboard technolo-

gies were introduced. The intention was to explore shared concurrent access to digital

design models, and to enhance the social interaction necessary to the to success

of the project. File naming conventions were introduced. Information was generally

exchanged in asynchronous modes. It had originally been thought that the desktop

video conferencing and electronic whiteboard facilities would help to facilitate this.

Thus e-mail and on-line chat may be more appropriate in many instances than more

sophisticated video-conferencing and electronic whiteboard technologies.

Fig. 2
Digital model of existing gasometer