CapAsia is a ten-week field study offered by the College of Architecture and Planning.  The immersive program provides participants with a meaningful cross section of world architecture, urbanism, and planning.  Graduate and undergraduate students focus on custom developed, collaborative design and planning projects in selected South Asian cities undertaken with particular schools and supported by local professionals and educators. 

The first CapAsia was conducted in Spring 1999 and included studies at the Nepal Engineering College in Kathmandu and the University of Moratuwa in Colombo, Sri Lanka.  CapAsia II (Spring 2001) returned to Moratuwa and partnered with the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi, India; the Kamla Raheja School in Mumbai, India; and the National University of Singapore.  In Spring 2003, CapAsia III sustained relationships in India and Sri Lanka, and made initial visits to Thailand and Malaysia; it also included visiting students from MIT and UC-Berkeley.

No other American university has offered a similar learning experience even once, much less completed three, regularly scheduled field studies of this scope. 

Eight graduate students from the Collegeof Architectureand Planning participated in the eleven-week CapAsia III field study in 2003.  From architecture: Dorothee Dettbarn, Brad McKinney, Jody Phillips, and Chamnarn Tirapas.   Urban planning: Claudia Canepa, Tony Noble, and Gardner Smith.  And from landscape architecture: Jae Eun Kim. 

Among the highlights: participation in a three-week ‘build-design-build' project at the University of Moratuwa in Colombo, Sri Lanka with faculty members Vijitha Basnayake, Varuna de Silva, and Madhura Prematilleke and forty undergraduate students.  Dr. Wes Janz of Ball State's Department of Architecture also joined the group.  As directed by Professor Basnayake, one team constructed a pavilion made primarily of scavenged wood materials (dismantled wood packing crates, disassembled timber pallets, and handsawn tree trunks); the other designed and constructed a ‘mud' pavilion that consisted of rubble from demolished campus buildings and an earth/sand/cement mixture poured into sacks that were sprinkled with water, then pounded into place.  Among the challenges: no money, the Sun, teams made up of 30 cross-national students, shockingly different hand tools, and no electricity on site.

Architecture professors tend to speak of ‘learning by building.'  In this sense, ‘to build' refers to the acquisition of established knowledge regarding construction, materials, and details.  ‘Building to learn' inverts as it expands the paradigm.  Graduate students work in a different country, on teams with students who (might) speak English as a second language, in a society with its own perspectives regarding the environment, locally available materials, recycling, and, one should say, America and Americans.  In this sense, and in keeping with the objectives of the graduate school, new knowledge about the design and planning fields is revealed, as new uses are found for existing knowledge.  As important, if not more so, for the Ball State graduate students ‘building to learn' refers to learning about one's self in relation to the ‘other,' rethinking one's place in the world, and questioning, fundamentally, how one chooses to engage the world and its people first as a fellow human being, then as architect, planner, or designer. 

CapAsia is not limited to Asia – it reaches back to Ball State as well.  Professors Jamal Ansari and Poonam Prakash from the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi, and Professor Madhura Prematilleke of the University of Moratuwa in Colombo have visited Ball State, and Professor Vijitha Basnayake will work in our Master of Architecture program in October 2003.  The graduate studio taught at Ball State by Dr. Janz in the Fall 2002 semester – ‘Leftover Spaces, Leftover Materials, Leftover People' – was conceived following his co-direction of CapAsia II in 2001, and influenced the Sri Lankan pavilions in 2003.  In addition, three students in the Master of Architecture program – Rabindra Adhikari (Nepal), Bhavana Mokha (India), and Nishit Somaiya (India) completed undergraduate programs with CapAsian connections.

Dr. Nihal Perera is the founder and director of CapAsia. 

Learn more about the CapAsia program.