Re-considering the Architectural Design Studio after Pandemic: Tools, Problems, Potentials

Abstract

The Covid-19 outbreak has significantly influenced all disciplines from economics to politics, especially health, and forced every discipline to develop new strategies to adapt to this situation. For this reason, education has been suspended as of mid-March 2020 in our country; after the break, education methods have changed in a mandatory and rapid way and largely switched to distance education. This compulsory transformation has required the creation of new methods and approaches, especially for applied courses. In this context, this article focuses on a remote architectural design studio experience and explores this experience's problems and potential. This research is in the framework of an adapted architectural design studio setup enriched by authors with online environment-specific tools, including components that centralize participatory production (collaborative learning approach) and enable interaction such as workshops and seminars. The studio (201 A) was experienced in the 2020-21 fall semester by remote conducting with 2nd-grade architecture students. In the article, the process is revealed in detail, and the architectural design studio has been discussed extensively with the student survey and the instructors' experiences. As a result, it has been observed that the studio's components, such as interaction, collectivism, multilayeredness, dynamism, making criticism, and juries, can survive in distance education. Although verbal communication difficulties were experienced in the remote studio, visuality/screen sharing supported the communication throughout the process. However, it is obvious that the content, methods, and tools for remote architectural design studio education should be developed with a different and new approach than face-to-face education. In order to develop more effective methods in this scope, research is required to continue, prepare a large number of experience environments supported by these studies and, most importantly, share these experiences.

Keywords

• Remote education
• Architectural design studio
• Covid-19
• Virtual design studio

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