Cooperating on Architectural Analyses

At our faculty, a three + two year bachelor and masters program is being implemented instead of a five year program. Additionally, a system of five periods of each eight weeks per year is being replaced by a semester-based system. As part of this substantial curriculum review, the role of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) in the design studio is being reassessed. In this paper, we focus on the fourth semester design studio which will be held each semester from the fall semester of this year on for about 350 students per year, and describe one particular aspect of this role we are developing for this semester. The central design theme of this studio is a small public building. In the progress of the studio, the students will first perform an analysis of selected precedents according to various criteria. Given a relatively complex functional program, they will then design and work out the materialization of their building, while documenting their entire design process. The documentation of this design process is stored, managed, organized, and presented in an integrated document management communication environment (Stouffs et al., 2002). We will provide the students with a web-based environment for the storage and management of their analysis, and tools to perform this analysis. In this way, the students will benefit from a collaboration with peers, and by integrating the analysis results into a common, extensible, library, they will be able to draw upon other results for comparisons and relationships between different aspects or buildings. Within this context, we are develop-