400 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
A concrete exercise
This exercise was carried through at the 3rd year lev-
el. The students received a theoretical program that
consisted of a fictitious schematic allotment, where
each student would assemble his/her habitation.
The only design constrains where the implantation
polygon and the maximum height of the buildings.
The semester was divided in two parts, being
the first half dedicated to the conception phase and
the second pertaining documentation production.
As a design methodology, pupils where discouraged
(but not forbidden) to use any analogical support.
The purpose was that ideas would be developed
exclusively in a virtual environment, and that the
design options would be registered by the evolution
of shapes and solutions. The determinative factor of
this exercise was that each project, although indi-
vidually developed, resided on a common database.
Trough ArchiCAD, a file was created with all the
necessary templates, layers, stories heights, pens,
materials, etc. Each student had his own allotment
and layer combination. As all the Architecture Com-
puter Laboratory computers are connected through
a net, each student worked in a local copy, making
frequent uploads of his/her design to the central file,
downloading the colleagues work left there. Thus it
became possible to have all students working simul-
taneously on a common data base.
As predicted, it was possible to verify that indi-
vidual design influenced each other, as the work
got along. It was thus possible to create unique
operational conditions - 14 students working on one
same virtual space, influencing themselves mutually
in real time - only feasible trough the employment
of information technologies.
This exercise, besides simulating and stimulating
collaborative work between architects, intended to
demonstrate that the concept of digital databases
applied to architectural design necessarily means a
redefinition in the methodologies.
In the second half of the semester each pupil
developed his project independently, into the docu-
mentation phase, with automatic generation of draw-
ings from the model – floor plans, sections, eleva-
tions, details, perspectives and quantity takeoffs.