User:Balthasar104/sandbox
The world tour program, known to the Ball State College of Architecture and Planning as the Polyark Tour, is an intensive trip for architecture, urban planning, and landscape students. A 3 credit hour prep-course is required for the trip, where students enhance their sketching ability and research cultural do’s and don’ts. During the tour period from early-January until mid-April, both faculty and accepted students embark on a 15 week long trip travelling to numerous cities across the globe. An average group size is 40 students and 2 faculty advisors. Travelling plans include numerous days of linear travel, alternating with approximately three 4-6 day residential based periods linked with local Universities and/or design/planning institutions. While abroad, the architecture department curriculum includes a required 15 credit hours of intensive studio coursework, daily visitations and guided tours, and an overarching final project upon their return home. The goal of the trip is for the students to identify the design principles of the past, present, and future cultures of countries visited. Students are encouraged to use the “world” as their studio as they visit urban, rural, and natural environments. Via the P18/WT4 course work web site, family members and friends can also visit a consistently updated website that acts as the class blog. Here, visitors will have opportunities to review course work in progress while the students are en-route. These websites now serve as archives for trip experiences, coursework, and reflections from the students. Initiated over 30 years ago, this trip occurs periodically only every few years with internet blogs dating back to 2004. Originally started by architecture professors Les Smith and Rod Underwood, the trip was only to single countries for a month at a time, only having turned into a semester-long excursion in 2000.
[2004]
[2007]
This year only 33 students made it in the application process for the World Tour. This trip visited major countries such as Spain, Italy, Egypt, and China.
[2010]
The first country visited on this tour was Dublin, Ireland. The initial flight overseas took over 18 hours with multiple obstacles along the way. Some interesting facts about the trip in 2010 were that 8,948,660 steps were taken, 50,000 photos were snapped, and 5,600 sketches were made. These facts were accumulated by students during their day-to-day documentation of every aspect of the trip. This year, students were asked to develop and maintain an extensive set of drawings and sketches in order to record their observations throughout the tour. Link to the site: http://www.bsu.edu/worldtour/polyark18/index.html
Examples of Visited Countries
Southern Europe Spain Italy Greece Turkey Egypt Far East Thailand Cambodia Vietnam Singapore / Kula Lumpur Hong Kong China Central East Mongolia Kazakhstan
Scandinavia Finland Sweden Eastern Europe Lithuania Estonia Latvia Hungary Northern/Central Europe Poland Czechoslovakia Austria Germany France Belgium Netherlands Great Britain Ireland Required En-route CAP Professional Courses 1. Design Studio: Hometown Intervention/Improvement Project 2. Analytical Drawing & Sketching 3. Colloquium: Sustainable Environments & Globalization 4. Theory/Design Principles: (History/Theory – Indigenous to Contemporary: Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban/City/Town/Village Planning)
http://cms.bsu.edu/Academics/CollegesandDepartments/CAP/Activities/StudyAbroad/WorldTour.aspx http://www.bsu.edu/worldtour/polyark17/index.html http://www.bsu.edu/worldtour/polyark14/ http://www.bsu.edu/worldtour/polyark18/