The recent COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant effect on higher education institutions and in particular delivery of design and architectural education. The co-presence of educators and students and creating affordances for physical and material spatial experiences, as well as collaborative work, has long been at the heart of architectural education and its studio culture. This issue aims to capture the imminent changes that this pandemic promises and provide a platform for sharing pedagogic experiences, practices and perspectives for the future of architectural education.
The rapid global transition to a distanced and remote mode of education, on the one hand, has created inevitable challenges in executing conventional practice using foreign media. Most notably, this has largely removed the situated representational practices of drawing and making from architectural studio teaching, placing significant reliance on the use of verbal language, while accelerating the shift to solely digital outputs. It has also called into question the preparedness of educators and learners in adopting alternative forms of educations and brought heightened attention to the affective dimensions of effective learning, adding transparency to the hidden aspects of curriculum delivery, such as how assessment is appropriated and approached by educators and learners alike. Lastly, it has challenged the importance of place and space in architectural education not only as sites of embodied knowledge production but also as the very subject matter of the discipline, in a society where architectural space implodes to the extreme interiority of isolation. The relevance of problems, issues and methodologies explored within architectural briefs and curricula, design values and the expectations of both the society and professional bodies from architectural graduates are in this context put into question.
