From atelier to e-telier: virtual design studios

The design studio, as physical place and pedagogical method, is the core of architectural education. Ateliers clustered around rue Napoleon in Paris defined the Ecole des Beaux Arts. The Carnegie Endowment report on architectural education, published in 1996, identified a comparably central role for studios in schools today. From programs, schemes, and parti to desk crits, pin-ups, and charrettes-language and behavior learned in the studio establish the profession's cultural framework. Advances in CAD and visualization, combined with technologies to communicate images, data, and "live" action, now enable virtual dimensions of studio experience. Students no longer need gather at the same time and place to tackle the same design problem. Critics can comment over the network or by e-mail, and distinguished jurors can make virtual visits without being in the same room as the pin-up-if there is a pin-up (or a room). Virtual design studios (VDS) have the potential to favor collaboration over competition, diversify student experiences, and redistribute the intellectual resources of architectural education across geographic and socioeconomic divisions. The catch is predicting whether VDS will isolate students from a sense of place and materiality, or if it will provide future architects the tools to reconcile communication environments and physical space.