Teaching a Dynamic Perspective on Building Systems
Kirk Martini, Architecture
Bill Sherman, Architecture
2002 TTI Fellows
Email: whs2b@Virginia.EDU,
km6e@Virginia.EDU
Project website: (under construction)
This is a two-part project. The first part involves developing the course Arch 406, Elastic Boundaries, taught by Bill Sherman. This is a required course for all undergraduate majors, and is also taken by many graduate students. The primary pedagogic goal is to use technology to teach a newly emerging perspective in building technology, where the building is viewed as a mediator which responds dynamically to natural forces, rather than a collection of mechanical systems that maintains a static environment.
The second part of the project involves developing a new model for the organization and dissemination of digital teaching materials. This part of the project will involve Kirk Martini, who has an extensive collection of materials developed from a 1995-96 TTI project. Mr. Martini will work with the Digital Media Center and the Library to develop a protocol to gather digital files and descriptive data so that materials from his course and Mr. Sherman's course can be effectively searched and retrieved both by students in a course and by other faculty and students outside the course who may have an interest in the materials.
With respect to Arch 406, there are two key pedagogic issues. First, the course recently started addressing fundamental principles of heat and air flow, following the retirement of a faculty member who covered this material from a traditional mechanical engineering perspective. There is an opportunity and challenge to use computer modeling to teach thermal and air-flow principles as they apply to natural ventilation systems, which is now an important trend in practice, particularly in Europe. Second, the philosophical underpinnings of architectural design and its relation to heat, air, light, and water have undergone a conceptual shift in recent years from a static, quantitative paradigm to a dynamic, qualitative one. This is partly driven by energy concerns, but more by new insights into the human responses to overly engineered environments. Developing case studies in digital form allows students to have greater access to the materials which offers many pedagogic opportunities and advantages over conventional formats.