Utopian Phalansteries: designing a course for architectural literacy

Abstract

This paper will describe the development of a new EAP course for current Year 1 Architecture students at HKU that will become one module of the English in the Discipline course for Year 2 architecture students in the four year curriculum. The course aims to provide opportunities to enhance students' linguistic range specifically in their approach to architectural literacy. Architecture students are more used to expressing their work in drawings and models but they need to justify these verbally, and there is a body of reading they are expected to engage with, to help articulate their own design concepts and to reference well-known architectural work. They also need to produce short written texts for their portfolios. The course has been developed in response to these demands, specifically reading long critical texts, analyzing genre-specific features of architectural writing, and dealing with impromptu answers to the unexpected questions typical of the design studio. In this presentation we will explain the theoretical framework underpinning our course, and provide examples of the way this has been implemented.