A Group of Friends: The Las Americas Network, Virtual Studios, and Distance Education in Architecture

This paper celebrates the human factor by describing how our collective vocation towards innovation in design education has inspired the development of an active network across the Americas. Ten years after its creation, the Las Americas Digital Research Network has generated a stream of innovative implementations. This is the first time that the main stream of these research activities is articulated into a peer-reviewed journal publication. The narrative of the paper follows a time-line that starts with the creation of the Las Americas Digital Research Network in 1996. Supported by such a framework the paper continues to describe the implementation of virtual design studios as collaborations nested at the core of the network. Finally, the paper explains how the virtual design studios provide fundamental feasibility for the development of network-mediated distance education curricula in architecture and the opening of a new dimension in the development and deployment of collaborative networks.