Abstract:

Object of study:
The contribution describes the didactic experience of teaching the basic techniques of architectural survey during the spring semester of academic year 2020/2021, held online due to the pandemic. The context is the Italian one of Politecnico di Torino, first year bachelor in architecture. This experience is part of a wider educational proposal which finds its applications within the Architectural Drawing and Survey Laboratory (held by Authors both in Italian and in English), an annual course that guides freshmen in acquiring the foundations of architectural language (drawing) and the basis of the tools useful to analyse the built (survey). The course structure includes descriptive geometry, hand drawing, 2D and 3D CAD drawing, direct survey procedures and simple indirect survey techniques.

State of the art:
In the architectural field, professionals conduct survey operations for many purposes and can use many tools/techniques (Ippolito, 2016). We discuss with students about some techniques of direct/indirect survey. Due to the pandemic situation we have been struggling during the previous 2019/2020 a.y. because we had to move our traditional teaching, based on facing topics with on-site exercises and fruitful teamwork among students, toward an online one, thus changing a well established paradigma (Ippoliti 2000). This change resulted in a set of small exercises to let students face applicative processes in autonomy, asking them to work on more simple objects than usual and to elaborate a direct survey of their home.

Research methodology:
To introduce students to a more complex object and with the feared and then real possibility to be forced to online teaching during the 2020/2021 spring semester, we designed a new activity of survey that could be followed and elaborated ‘indirectly’ online and not on-site. To do so, we identified a portion of a building of our university compound in the Valentino Castle in Torino. We created a set of drawings and pictures containing many surveyed information about dimensions and levels. We then provided all these materials to our students, to let them elaborate such a set of metrical information. We also recorded five videoclips (the introductory one in Italian and English) dedicated to: site inspection, planimetric survey, leves, plans & trilaterations, elevations & picture rectification. We had to design their shooting and to evaluate how to communicate simple procedures mediated by a camera. Of course we could not think that such videos were to be considered substitutes of a normal lecture and of the practical activities, in fact, as soon as there was an opportunity, we did bring our students in the classroom to test the tools described in the videos. We then ask students to elaborate an exercise dealing with this workflow (four weeks). We guided them during collegial revisions and we evaluated their works with a scale of 0-8 points.

Objectives pursued and achieved:
We have been doing this experience with our students in the past spring semester and now we can critically analyze our didactic implementation of preset materials. Students appreciated the videoclips, because they had the possibility to look at them many times, trying to grasp the fundamental steps of a direct survey procedure. Nonetheless, the main issue students’ works highlight is that many of them had problems with connecting together different information provided.

Keywords:

Architecture, Drawing, Architectural Survey, Tools, Online Survey.