Since the recent COVID-19 quarantine restrictions were enforced, social media has been filled with images of employees working from home, students transitioning to home-school learning, and friends and family socializing via Skype calls and Zoom meetings. With the outpouring of tips for how to work from home, and how to keep a regular routine during these certain times, many people are questioning how to create a long term plan for online studio design instruction.

This article aims to provide some practical tips to schools and students around the globe based on our experience with online design studio teaching in our Master program at Tsinghua University’s School of Architecture since February.

This article serves as a brief introduction to a way of thinking that I assume to be foreign and new to most of the readers. It is based on some observations I’ve made during the past 5 years as part of my PhD research into the comparison between two traditions of architectural representation, between China and Europe, under guidance of prof. Li Xiaodong at Tsinghua University in Beijing. With that in mind this article has no pretension, nor the proper length, to fully convey the complexity of the representations of architectural space in drawings from China, but should be seen as a first try to communicate some of these ideas to a wider audience.

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