From January 15 to 19, 2018, Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai) held a short-term intensive workshop and special lecture for graduate and undergraduate students, inviting Andreas Lang, Course Leader in MARCH Architecture and MA Architecture: Cities and Innovation at Central Saint Martins(CSM), and co-founder of Public Works, a non-profit critical design practice that occupies the terrain between art, architecture and research. He and our architecture professors co-supervised the program. Approximately 50 students including 10 from our architecture department participated in this program.

Under the theme of “situated drawing”, the workshop aimed to train the drawing skills of the participants, who were asked to mingle with local people in the areas where they were respectively assigned to and create drawings based on the experience. At the special lecture that was attended by many students, the outline of master’s programs at CSM and the working process at Public Works were explained chronologically. Many students continued to ask questions, even after the lecture has finished, on approaches in theory and practice including those of establishing process making, which is a recent trend in fine arts and architecture.

One of the largest outcomes of this project was “participated practice”, which is a mainstream method in the architectural education in Britain. Our architecture students are usually trained through the assignment-based program but they have only a few chances to actually take part in the local communities of the assigned locations. For this reason, it was highly meaningful for the students to make presentations on their project deliverables that were achieved through collaboration with people. Furthermore, the participating faculty members also learned a lot by attending the review sessions, where they discussed the role of collaboration in design and research.

The significance of this international exchange project is that it encourages qualitative description by a different context such as that of architecture as art. As an art university like Tokyo Geidai, CSM offers a variety of fine art programs, including those that do not exist at Tokyo Geidai, such as fashion, in particular, and the architecture programs take different approaches from ours for qualitative description of architecture and cityscapes. Furthermore, this project is also extremely important as it enables collaboration between the two institutions with different concepts for architectural studies, architecture, and urban space; in Britain, the focus of architectural studies as art has been placed on research of design since 1990s, while artistic approaches including “modernology” have been much taken into consideration at our the architecture department.

The architecture department at Tokyo Geidai will further promote international collaboration with CSM, with the aims of establishing a mutually complementary relationship and making a fresh development of design processes as an educational program.