AR0139 - MEGA
AR0139 MEGA is a MSc 2 course running at the TUDelft Faculty of Architecture. It is coordinated by M. Turrin. It is attended by students from Architecture MSc track of Architecture and MSc track of Building Technology and by students from Civil Engineering. It is a collaborative design course, focusing on the relevance of collaboration among specialists.
Students work in teams. Each team includes 6 (sometimes 7) students. Each team works as a multidisciplinary team and is responsible for delivering an integrated design of a complex building (usually a multifunctional high-rise building). Within the team, each student is responsible for one discipline. The disciplines are: architectural design; structural design; climate design and installations; façade design; design and construction management; and computational design.
During the design process, the student responsible for architecture takes care of aspects such as functional arrangements, layouts, urban relationships, integration in the context, aesthetic of the building, etc. The student responsible for structural design takes care of the design of the structural system, its dimensions, the numeric assessment of its performances, etc. The climate designer takes care of strategies for passive thermal comfort and daylight comfort, design of mechanical installations, the numeric assessment of their performances, etc. Similarly, other students take care of what concerns the domain of the other disciplines. As such, each student is supposed to have an appropriate background in the discipline (s)he chooses.
The course runs for 4 days/week full time, for 11 weeks. The first two weeks of the course are dedicated to lectures regarding each specific discipline; and intensive workshops to acquire skills on specific disciplines, software, etc. Moreover, the brief of the design assignment is presented to the students. From the end of the second week, the students can work in the atelier to develop their designs. During the design development, each discipline is tutored by tutors specialized in that discipline. Usually there are 2 tutors for each discipline, for a total of 12 tutors. The 12 tutors meet the students on a weekly basis for consulting the progress of each project, from the perspective of each tutor’s discipline. The learning objectives are subdivided in two categories. The first one includes the learning objectives for the entire class (indicated as learning objectives for the whole team). The second one includes the learning objectives for each specific discipline (indicated as learning objectives for the specialist). Each student is supposed to meet the learning objectives for the entire class and the learning objectives for his/her own one specific discipline.
