Break to Build: Impacts of a Pandemic-Driven Shift to Digital Curriculum in Beginning Design

This paper focuses on a particular Pre-Architecture program, one built around two models operating in parallel: a normative academic year course set—Foundations, and a competitive, summer intensive—Summer Design. The two sequences attract different demographics, and the course experiences markedly diverge. Their strongest commonality has been an emphasis on analog production in lieu of digital fluency – an untenable prospect in a newly virtualized curriculum. As a result of the pandemic, this long-standing analog beginning design curriculum had to be rewritten. In Fall 2020, students in these two factions impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic—Foundations and Summer Design— converged as a single Second-Year cohort. Their divergent experiences and abrupt shift to a digital workflow provided an opportunity to assess the impact of opposing learning settings and methods. Through a description of the program setup, an analysis of the work completed, and an evaluation of the impact on preparedness, via a survey of students as well as a faculty discussion, this paper will assess the early ramifications of a pedagogical paradigm shift in a beginning design program.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.109.53

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978-1-944214-37-1