A Critical Look at the Digital Technologies in Architectural Education: When, where, and how?

In the past decade, architectural education has seen an increasing amount of digital technologies being involved in the design studio curricula. Following the trends in the profession, these various technologies of computer aided drafting, enumerating, modeling, and analysis became not only key pedagogical nodes in the design studio, but also started to shape the overall curricular structure of architectural education as they also needed to be implemented as support courses in order to compensate the learning curves and the number of software available to architects. These digital technologies range from one end of simple drafting, conventional three dimensional modeling, and more sophisticated animation of buildings with a computer, to the other end of inventing new tectonic and spatial geometries using parametric computations. In this context, it will be unrealistic to argue against teaching and using digital technologies in architectural education. When one thinks how the profession has evolved in the past decade, it is necessary to embrace these tools in the architectural curriculum. However, a discussion that has not been clearly resolved is when, where, and how these digital tools are thought and used in the architectural education. My paper argues that the conventional tools of hand drawing, physical modeling, and hand making should be embraced in the foundational levels, and the digital tools should be introduced after developing a certain set of skills of one-to-one physical making where a sense of tectonic resolution, scale, and spatial experience is cultivated as a basis of architectural thinking with digital tools. In what follows, I will discuss this viewpoint through examples from architectural design studio education in the United States and in Turkey.