ARCH1142 z3249981 Xiaojing Lu: October 2008

Architectural communication is an intererting and helpful course for first year students in architecture. This course allows students to choose three workshops from five which cover a wide range of architectural study. These workshops are all useful and develops skills of communication by assignments.

I chose fluid thoughts to action, architecture in motion and architecutral drawing for my three workshop. Firstly, fluid thoughts to action was a challenge workshop because it has high requirement for drawing skills and this was really hard for an engineering student. However, it also paid much attention on the understanding of tones, scales and whole structures. We had a trip to the Opera House in the second week. This was the first experience for me drawing from a real structure. The project for this workshop is the collaboration work with our partners such as the simultaneous drawing and then putting them together. We also did presentations for our own drawings and expressed artists' theory.

Architecture in motion was my second workshop which was really interesting of making movie from drawings and models. The key for this workshop was spacial narrative that required students to express their understanding of a space from their movie. The process of making movie was drawing, modelling, taking photos and put them together into computers. It seemed more like a movie-making than architecture but it revealled strong idea of space.

Architectural drawing was the last workshop and this helped me to learned more about professional drawings such like how to scale and how to express ideas through a more techinical way rather than free hand drawing. We did 1:1 drawing of a tea cup, a 3D drawing for a house and shading on an existing drawing as our class tasks, and, a series of architectural drawings of Rose Seidler House as our project.

Overall, arch1142 is a good beginning for architecture students to put their ideas into assignments and communicate among groups. Architecutural communication is an essential thing in architecture and this will help students to learn further in the field of architecture.