Architecture and Place: Contextualizing Buildings Through Virtual Travel

On April 9, 2009 I attended an online NITLE event entitled Virtual Voyages: Using Technology to Convey a Sense of Place which was hosted by Martyn Smith, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Lawrence University. What I learned during this fascinating online presentation and discussion was how to utilize a variety of web resources to help students contextualize course information in geographic terms. The premise of the presentation was that professors at liberal arts colleges often find themselves charged with teaching about places in the world that their students are unlikely to ever experience in person although the experience of place is nevertheless crucial to an integrated understanding of the content involved. While actually travel to these places may not be possible to students, virtual travel, utilizing web resources orchestrated around Google Earth, is possible both in the classroom and in assignments. I have since begun to utilize this approach in my teaching and specifically in teaching modern architecture this past semester. I will be describing what I learned during this online presentation and how I anticipate using this in the future especially for my architecture courses in which an understanding of place is central to the material.