Internet Studios: Teaching Architectural Design On-Line between the United States and Latin America

Abstract

This article analyzes the pedagogical use of high-end computer graphics and low- and high-bandwidth Internet technology for international architectural education among numerous universities in the Americas. The findings can be applied to any discipline that involves a large number of participants within a design setting. The experiments have allowed design studios from seven schools of architecture in the U.S. and South America to work concurrently in a semester-long design studio. Most of the collaboration was accomplished by using low-bandwidth Internet communication such as web publishing, chat, computer-assisted design software and other technologies such as ISDN broadcasting. The author anticipates future experimentation with high-bandwidth technologies on the Internet2 Abilene Network.

Traditionally, architectural culture has based its progress on the individual creativity of the design genius. But today many architectural and urban situations fall beyond the reach of individual endeavors. Contemporary solutions lie in the construction of a collective and public consciousness, one that can respond to popular calls for action and even to certain types of consumer behavior. The vision of the Internet Studios initiative is the creation of a design community that can deal with very specific urban problems in large urban settings. But building such a community takes years. Thus, in the past 4 years, schools of architecture in Miami, Santiago, Valparaiso, Buenos Aires, Rosario, Guayaquil and Caracas have worked together in understanding how we can collaborate architecturally via our emerging and modest networks. In the first 4 years, the schools have tested different technologies and collaborative strategies with Internet technology during the traditional academic semesters. Today the Internet Studios have up to 300 students collaborating on-line. In the next 4 years, the members of the initiative are planning to address large urban problems and democratize the design process via more powerful networks such as Internet2. The members of the initiative are planning to include in these remote studios not only architects, but users, potential clients, government officials and citizens, who will comment on the Internet Studios' work.

Traditional Architectural Studios

Typically, design studios are at the core of the curriculum in architectural teaching. Traditionally, these studios are held in rooms with drafting tables on which students develop models, sketches, architectural drawings and perspectives of the projects assigned during the semester. Architectural studios not only simulate the real-time experience of an architectural office but also offer very intense interpersonal environments in which students may learn from each other as they search for design solutions. Knowledge, solution strategies and design culture are transmitted by what Donald Schon calls a process of "tacit learning" [1]. Tacit learning cannot be fully explained or fully structured. It is transmitted by examples, gestures and acts and developed by the investigation of problems as they arise.

Studio reviews, or design juries, are the traditional method for assessing student architectural work. Conventionally, students pin their drawings to a wall behind their physical models and explain their design concepts orally to the professors, visiting critics and students who gather around the pin-up space. After the oral presentation is completed, critics develop oral arguments in favor of or against different aspects of the student's design. After the presentation and the critique are completed, the pin-up spaces are dismantled, and the jury proceeds to review the next student.

The Objectives

The primary question confronted in this experience was: How can these new media technologies enrich the learning environment of the traditional design studio? This is a very complex question, because most distance-education software design and on-line teaching experiments support a structured mode of teaching and learning, not an unstructured or, as Schon calls it, a tacit one. Thus, the objectives of the experiment were the following:

• • The exploration of technologies and techniques that support intensive interaction among a large number of international participants with methodologies that sustain a variety of learning styles and technological conditions.

• • The development of pedagogical strategies for these technologies and techniques with the objective of increasing the rate of architectural progress in these design communities.

• • The repositioning of the creative processes of architecture...