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CAP World Tour

The world tour program, known to the Ball State University College of Architecture and Planning as the Polyark Tour, is an intensive trip for all three CAP disciplines: 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. In some years they are required to write a paper discussing their views on some global issues, such as politics, the economy, and different degrees of cultural sustainibility. Throughout the trip, they constantly update this paper as their growth in understanding makes rapid progress with each new city, finally concluding with a new position statemtent on their initial topic. 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 final project was integrated as part of the program to help students expand their horizons in the travel world while still implementing their newly developed design strategies into a local community setting. The goal of the trip itself 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.^[1]

Online Blogs

Each year the trips expand in scope and understanding, so online blogs were formed to tailor to the goals of the students as the trip progresses. In addition to the blogs, the Ball State University website also has a Digital Media Repository that contains a gallery of compiled pictures from the trips for architecture students to use as references back home. More personal photos are likewise shared on this blog for family and friends to see, along with student profiles and journal entries. The journal entries are comprised of sketches, photos, and written theories that explain in detail what the students studied that particular day. The sites include feedback links as well, where past faculty that have attended the trip can offer advice and in some cases critique the work being updated on the trip.

2004

This year, like many others, the students did extensive research in a prerequesite course to prepare them for the trip. The included cultural do's and don'ts on the blog along with some travel tips. This blog includes exmples of travel sites that helped prepare the students, such as Itchy Feet, Know Our World, Boots 'n All, and Travel Notes. The site also includes sections for analysis, design, participant profiles, and daily journal entries. One reported entry included a story about how the group was stuck at the Chicago Midway Airport for over 20 hours due to flight cancellations and delays. Because it was one of the first semester-long trips, only 18 countries were visited. Some examples included Austria, China, Cyprus, Malaysia, Poland, Singapore, Spain, and India. Upon their return home in May, students compiled information and presented their findings through a series of lectures to be presented to the College of Architecture and Planning in early November. The lecture series was entitled World Tour Festival. ^[2]

2007

This year only 33 students made it in the application process for the World Tour. Of the 33, 2 graduate students travelled with the group and contributed with updates involving their own independent studies abroad. This trip visited major countries such as Spain, Italy, Egypt, and China. This blog began the tradition of students including memorable quotes from the trip; most were in regards to the weather, the conditions of the hotels, and the tour guides. Examples of countries visited were Egypt, France, Greece, and China. They also listed several interesting facts, including spending a total of 281 hours in transit, 550 miles walked per person on average, and a total of 387,940 pictures taken. ^[3]

2010

This tour in particular included the highest amount of students so far; there were 40 students: one urban planning, 13 landscape architecture, 26 architecture students, and two professors.^[4] 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. Brandon Hoopingarner, a participant of this tour, shared his experiences of the trip publicly on the Ball State website. He listed the benefits of having resources after the trip as well as the kind of person it shaped him to be in his post-graduate career. ^[5]

Structures & Building Types Studied

Church Buildings

Streetscapes

Dwellings/Homes

Temples

Palaces

Cathedrals

Museums

Art museum

Plazas/City Squares

Cityscapes

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)