Teaching common language in architecture with short movies

Abstract

At the school of Architecture, Lund University, courses are taught in different ways. A large part of the
education during year one and two is held as “studios”, doing creative (individual) project work, with
helping teachers always available for supporting the students. Smaller courses, as the “technical
courses”, rather correspond to the traditional engineering education style, using lectures, exercises,
small project works (in larger groups) and final written examination. The problem is that many students
are not able to fully assimilate the content from the technical courses and don’t know how they should
make use of the gathered information in their creative project works. They have also difficulties in
talking about their project works, as they are lacking a common architectural language.
The aim of the study covered by this paper was to improve upon the existing teaching/learning scheme
by introducing new methodologies. Each and every student should have a very good understanding of
the basic concepts and techniques that underlie the field of study, and this independently from their
initial academic and personal background. Moreover, they should master the commonly accepted and
used vocabulary for the field of study.
In order to achieve our goal, we gave the students two different assignments: In the first assignment,
the students had to produce short educational movies (several different topics, such as structure,
acoustics, hierarchy, etc.) to explain and teach their topic to their peers. In the second assignment, they
should implement the new knowledge gathered in the first assignment into their individual creative
projects. Special topics they should implement were acoustics and structure.
Most students produced really impressive movies and everybody liked this assignment. However, the
implementation into the individual creative projects was not equally good, as most students had not
included thoughts about acoustics and structure, two essential topics. Only the very best students,
mostly from the second year, really improved and reached a higher level of understanding when
assessing their level before and after the second assignment.