Teaching drawing in a shared community

Abstract

At the Faculty of Civil Engineering, Sapienza University, Rome, the first year Architecture Drawing course comprises a total of 162 hours (12 Formative Credits or CFU) divided into 51 hours of lectures, 51 hours of exercises and 60 hours of laboratory. Generally a six-months long course, this year it has been reduced into a three-months long course, from October to January, requiring a compression of the program. The problems due to the program compression and to the change of teacher were stressed by the measures for containing the Covid-19 diffusion. The former teacher was reputed “fragile” and precluded from teaching in presence and a new teacher was given the course. Moreover, Sapienza University adopted a mixed format, with a few students present in the classroom and most of them at home. Besides the many technical and instrumental difficulties due to the late equipment of the classrooms with updated hardware and software, the late registration of about a quarter of the students after the admission tests caused some of them to join the class more than a month after the first lesson. Anyway, a friendly collaboration between the “old” and the “new” teacher contributed to overcome most of the organizational questions.