Arquitectura y educación: Architecture and education

Abstract

The crucial challenges of the architecture and planning designs today: the climatic changes, the fast growing urbanisation of the environments, the financial crisis, the impact of design by computer, the need of knowledge basic designs etc, all these challenges can be the starting point for an architectural education renewal.

Our proposal can be, then, optimistic, in the middle of a very complex and difficult scenario. Sometimes, the worst scenarios can be the seed for radical innovation, and we will try to describe this possibility of positive changes in architectural education, if, and only if, some conditions are accomplished. The work has three parts: first, a pedagogic meditation taking into account the last ideas about how our body and our mind behave in order to know challenges of a general architectural education to day. The second part, it is the consideration of design as a responsive "creative chronotope", using the definitions of the late Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin, in order to take advantage of our professional circumstances today. And, finally, the third part, will deal with the institutional aspect of architectural education and with the need for new "scenarios" for more effective schools of architecture in our universities.