Form and Visualisation

Abstract

How should one go about creating a wholly new educational program – with the aim of furthering the understanding of architectural Form and the development of essential Visualisation skills – within strictly defined constraints, concerning the available study time and academic staff, plus a binding, interdisciplinary curriculum organization?
This Paper documents the thematic integration and thorough ‘re-design’ of pre-existing foundational courses into two ‘twinned’ first-year Bachelor teaching applications, with ‘Form and Visualisation’ as their guiding theme.
The challenge was set some four-and-a-half years ago, when the faculty’s (then) Dean decided to completely re-organize the existing Bachelor curriculum. The aim: to create an efficient and cost-effective integral study program, with clearly identifiable components and intellectually stimulating and creatively challenging new course concepts.
The consequences of the initiative were far-reaching and involved re-defining – and frequently re-inventing – teaching methods and -contents. All of the new BSc programs would be required to fit into a rigorous, top-down, three-year time-frame, whereby the subjects of wholly different disciplines (in our case: Building Technology and Architectural History & Theory), would need to be offered simultaneously, in parallel trajectories.
Whilst the ‘old’ program was still up-and-running, a busy half-year was spent developing a tightly organized conglomerate of interwoven educational modules. Then (some four years ago) the entire Bachelor curriculum was re launched in one go: a logistically and pedagogically challenging operation, to say the least!