ARCHI21: Building castles in the air: training architects in cyberspace

The eLanguages team are helping the architects of tomorrow to construct their grand designs in cyberspace, through an international project funded by the European Union.

Researchers from France, Denmark and Slovenia as well as the UK are developing new ways for students to design their own buildings in a Second Life online virtual world. This will both give them valuable three-dimensional perspectives of their projects and create opportunities to communicate about them in different languages.

The eLanguages team in Modern Languages and colleagues in Southampton's School of Education are part of a consortium of European universities led by the French Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture Paris-Malaquais. The consortium is receiving funding over two years under the LLP Transversal Programme to conduct research into Architectural design, education and practice through Content & Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) using the Second Life immersive virtual environment.

The ARCHI21 Project began in November 2010 with a start-up meeting in Paris and the creation of a project island in Second Life. In January 2011 an 'Intensif' course in Second Life took place involving French and other European students of Architecture, their teachers and language mediators.

A presentation and poster were given at the 4th Annual Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference. The poster, created by Light Sequent, was awarded first place in the People's Choice Poster competiton at the conference. For further information see www.cybergogy.co.uk.

Launch of ARCHI21 Island

The ARCHI21 project island is now open to visitors. Search for 'ARCHI21' or go directly to the SLURL.

The project and its dedicated island are also featured on the Second Life Academic Showcase.

ARCHI21 Showcase at the LLAS e-learning Symposium 2012

From left to right: conference delegates are guided on a walk around the ARCHI21 virtual island by a language mediator; the ARCHI21 project poster; another member of the team answers questions in front of the project poster (pdf, 6291kb):