BArch Year 2 narrative workshop 06.10.24
BArch Year 2 narrative workshop 06.10.24
Following the Lecturer’s Toolkit for Collaborative Drawing, we ran a series of collaborative exercises in the first 2024-25 Year 2 Design Studio session. There were a couple of reasons for doing this. Firstly, it provided an opportunity for students within the Studio Group to get to know each otehr and informally work together. Secondly, it helped students to relax into the creative process by working together which prepared them for individual tasks later on in the session.
The first task, was for students in their Studio Group (approx. 15 students) to create a collaborative drawings. They drew a series of overlapping squares/rectangles, then moved around the drawing and added various perspective points and lines to turn these into volumes/spaces. Moving around the drawing regularly, students added hatching, shading and finally people and objects.
The second task involved small groups of students (4-5 students) within the studio group creating a collaborative collage based on a narrative relating to their coursework project. Students were given the same narrative and spent 20 minutes individually thinking/sketching their ideas for the collaborative collage. Students shared their individual ideas within their small group. They then agreed how they would bring these ideas together to create one collaborative collage. Using various magazines, students were given 40 minutes to make their collaborative collage. At the end of this time, all of the collaborative collages were laid out in the architecture studio for students to see how other groups had responded to the same narrative.
Some feedback from students on the day when asked what worked well:
“I think the collage helped us generate a lot of ideas and we were able to connect it to our theme [individual work].”
“The group work to introduce the idea of what was expected.”
“Working with people at the start to get used to the work but then being able to go off and do my own work.”
“…the time restraint was good. It helped me to not overthink as much and to just get on with the more experimental process.”
“Stopped me from working slowly and challenged my habit of wanting everything to be perfect.”
Written by Gavin Orton, Senior Lecturer at NTU
