Blind Date: The Doll’s House. An Alternative Studio Design Project

Abstract

By the end of 2015, Saudi students developed a project at Prince Sultan University Department of Architecture of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Doll’s house aimed to design a model house that would look like a toy while inspiring a Saudi doll’s house of the future. The final work was selected as part of the Spanish Biennial exhibition organized by Women in Visual Arts. A group of young Spanish architects and students from the Pontificia University of Salamanca joined the Saudi group by doing an interpretative approach to their model houses as part of the Biennial exhibition. The process started with a series of exchanges whereby the Spanish architects first received the graphic information. The fact of being unrelated to the houses’ designers, added to the technical impossibility to meet each other, was the reason why this experience was titled The Blind Date. The final outcome was presented and on show at the Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid in September 2016. This paper addresses the teaching and learning experience developed throughout the project, starting with the design process in Riyadh, going through the confrontation with the western world during the interpretation process in Madrid, and concluding with the final exhibition. This paper intends to critically assess the experience and conclude by evaluating this exchange as a potential educational tool.