<Symposium Overview: Presentations' outlines>Global Architect's Education: Tea Room Database of Interactive Online Workshops

Abstract

Educating architects with a global perspective is a challenge that all institutions across the world are now facing. At Akashi College, in the department of architecture we have developed several programs that receive foreign students or send our students abroad to give them a global perspective to architectural training. Among those programs the Tea Room Workshop, where Japanese and Brazilian students work together on the design for a tearoom, was the most successful. As we have experienced during the Tea Room Workshop, working with typical elements of Japanese culture is a good method to instigate international exchange and global education. However, the cost of coming to Japan or going abroad limited the number of students that can participate in these workshops. We expect that by using new information technologies we will be able to develop tools that would permit the realization of workshops online, through which several students could work together on the design for a tearoom. The workshops would take place at an online interactive platform, which would also store tutorials about Japanese traditional architecture and the material produced by the students, such as videos or drawings.