468 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
that we teach our students how to make projects is strongly related to the way that
we understand architecture. It therefore follows that different understandings of
architecture imply different ways of teaching a project. Over the years, then, we have
had different ways of understanding or defining architecture, and as a consequence
we have totally different pedagogies and totally different ways of teaching project.
Maria has already mentioned the white coats of the laboratory teachers of the 50s.
Before that, it was the atelier. After that we had laboratories where the teachers
had abandoned their white coats for grey-green jackets, jeans and yellow-orange
shoes, for this was the period when the laboratory was a social laboratory, or perhaps
it would be more accurate to say a political laboratory. Then the studio appeared, and
all the talk was of the studio; and now, finally, we have labs, and all the talk is of labs.
We all, of course, realise that inside this room totally different teaching practices have
taken and are taking place, because they are based on totally different understandings
of architecture. Therefore, different ways of teaching project, different pedagogies
are strongly related to our different ways of thinking about architecture. Every time
we have a shift in the understanding of architecture we have, by definition, whether
we choose to or not, different teaching approaches, different pedagogies.
The third thesis/hypothesis I want to discuss is not a purely pedagogical one. In
the early 70s, or a little before, there was an obvious and very significant change
in pedagogy as science and pedagogy as practice. It was a major shift from educa-
tion defined as a problem-solving activity to education defined as a project. This
shift is very significant; and it will probably be interesting to go a little bit deeper
into what it involved, because I feel that this will be helpful in the discussion that
Antonino initiated with such passion. The words ‘problem’ and ‘project’, of Greek
and Latin origin respectively, have similar etymologies. I will begin with the Greek
for obvious reasons.
The word ‘problem’ comes from the Greek noun probleima, which is derived from
the verb proballein, meaning to throw forward, from the prefix pro-, forward, and
the verb ballein, to throw. The family of words derived from the root verb, ballein, to
throw, includes hyperballein, meaning to throw beyond, to throw far away, to look far
away and to throw there; the resulting English noun is ‘hyperbole’. The English word
‘parable’ derives from paraballein, meaning to throw alongside, that is to say to throw
something into an existing context. Then there are the words symballein, meaning to
throw together, or compare, from which we get the word ‘symbol’, and the word dia-
ballein, to throw across, which has come down into English as ‘devil’, which signifies
an obstacle that exists or something that I overcome. From this investigation of the
word ‘problem’ derivatives, we can understand that we are speaking about concepts
describing the act of doing in architecture: we have to look ahead, there has to be
a meaning to doing that, we are acting in a context and we have to overcome some
obstacles. This was the approach until the 1960s.
Moving on now to the etymology of the word project, the interesting thing is that
the Latin root projicere (the French and English forms come from the past participle,
projectum) means exactly the same thing with the word ‘problem’, that is to say ‘to
throw ahead’. We have the same basic etymological origin, but there is a very inter-
esting difference in the derivatives: subject, object, trajectory,... Indeed, when we
are speaking about a project, we have by definition or by necessity to speak about a