Facilitating the complexity of architectural analyses

It is common practice for architecture students to collect documents on prominent buildings relevant to their design task in the early stage of design. While practitioners can rely on a body of design experience of their own, during the process of a new design, students can only draw from the examples of success and failure from other architects. In the past, such precedent based learning was implicit in the master-apprentice relationship common in the educational system. Nowadays academics commonly no longer have the possibility to maintain an extensive design practice, and instead introduce important outside precedents to the students. Thus, the study of important historical precedents or designs plays an important role in design instruction and in the studentsi design processes. While there is no doubt that the most effective outcome of such a study would be achieved when the student does entire the study herself, students also benefit from a collaboration with peers, where they form groups to do an analysis of various aspects of a same building or over a group of buildings. By integrating the respective results into a common, extensible, library, students can draw upon other results for comparisons and relationships between different aspects or buildings. The complexity this introduces is best supported in a computer medium.The Web offers many examples of architectural analyses on a wide variety of subjects. Commonly, these analyses consist of a collection of documents, categorized and hyperlinked to support navigation through the information space. More sophisticated examples rely on a database for storage and management of the data, and offer a more complex categorization of the information entities and their relationships. These studies present effective ways of accessing and browsing information, however, it is precluded within these analyses to distinguish and relate different components within the project documents. If enabled, instead, this would offer a richer information structure presenting new ways of accessing, viewing, and interpreting this information. Hereto, documents can be decomposed by content. This implies both expanding the document structure, replacing document entities by detailed substructures, and augmenting the structureis relatedness with content information. The relationships between the resulting components make the documents inherently related by content.We propose a methodology to integrate project documents into a single model, and present an application for the presentation of architectural analyses in an educational setting. This approach provides the students with a simple interface and mechanisms for the presentation of an analysis of design precedents, and possibly their own designs. Since all the information is integrated within a single environment, students will benefit from each othersi studies, and can draw new conclusions across analyses and presentations from their peers.