From the application to Chalmers for the funding of our evaluation project:

The study trip is a central element in the architect’s education. Nothing compares to experiencing architecture on the spot, in all of its material tangibility and spatial dimension. An acquaintance with the humanities and creative arts and their relation to architecture is also a central element in the architect’s education, according to the 1985 EU directive for architecture (II:3:2–3). How this can be provided for in the architect’s education needs to be discussed continuously.

This application aims to deepen such a discussion by way of an evaluation of a remarkably successful elective course,  ARK380 Material theory of architecture. The course is open to students from all years of the Architecture as well as the Architecture and Technology study programme. In the three years that the course has been given, it has been completed by ca 50 students each year. In this years installment, the fourth, 100 students have applied. The interest shows that the course fulfills a need, both in its way to broaden [notion of] the study trip by way of literature and film about the city to visit, and thereby also to strengthen the humanistic perspective and the connection between art and science. The course is pursued as a series of literature seminars, a concluding study trip (to a new city each year), and an examination in the form of an exhibition where the students interpret the city in drawings, photographs and writings.

The evaluation and development will take the form of interviews with former students, the teachers’ reflections about the course, and the scrutiny of a visiting committee consisting of teachers and researchers from schools of architecture in Sweden and abroad with particular competence in the area. We believe that this kind of course is uncommon also in an international perspective, even though it deals with questions that are decisive for the architect’s profession and its present development. For this reason, it is especially valuable to have it evaluated, and we claim that it can add elements [to the education as a whole] that all students of architecture could profit from as well as contribute to the collegial discussion within the department.