Talking, Drawing and Realizing Together: Identifying Elements of Desk Tutorials in Architectural Design Studios

Traditionally, teaching in architecture is anchored in situations of tutoring within a studio, where students are developing individual projects at their desks. At the Schools of Architecture in Denmark, this is especially relevant since project-related work covers most of the ECTS points required in the education. In this unique educational tradition students receive regular feedback on design
development from tutors. However, since we, as tutors, often unfold our desk tutorials in one-to-one situations, we rarely question and discuss what a tutoring session actually consists of, how it unfolds and why it works? Instead this is often a tacit knowledge having been developed from years of experience, thus essential parts of this unique and also intimate situation remain less described.
This paper presents a development project at the Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark (AAA) 2019-20, to study desk tutorials with the aim of identifying and uncovering elements of these and to discuss the impact and potential of this format of teaching. The study has happened from monitoring tutoring sessions conducted by three teachers with students at both undergraduate and master level. Three of these tutoring sessions have been analyzed and compared by the use of a script-model, developed through the process.