470 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
achieve the generation of the form. In the case of curriculum the competences are
the parameters to be defined.
We are confronting this very significant change and it is our task as schools of
architecture to consider it now, not tomorrow; to think about what we have to do
in order to move towards a more parametric conception of our curricula and at the
same time in order to move from mass production in our educational system to mass
customisation. And I say today and not tomorrow, because this new approach has
already begun to be institutionalised, as Dimitri mentioned; and of course this insti-
tutionalisation is killing the spirit of the new, but at the same time it is provoking
another new situation. But we have to react immediately. We have to do something,
because if we as schools of architecture or as architects do not, then someone else
will do so in our place; and in such a case it would be an imposition that I am sure
that would not be as thoughtful as it would if it emerged from our experiences. This
is why I invite you to continue this debate. Not only in order to see how many truths
exist in this room, because we had the experience to follow at least forty different
truths through the presentations, but mainly to find the way to reconcile all those
differences into something that will not be prescriptive but will foster our creativity.
To speak about the project and more specifically about the educational project is
not something easy to pin down and discuss, because a project is always conceived
and discussed in absentia, so to speak. The moment that it is realised it disappears.
This, then, is why I think that we have to intensify our efforts and, I hope, be able
to continue this discussion at another time and place. Thank you very much.
Maria Voyatzaki, Thessaloniki, Greece
Thank you, Constantin. We will now hear some comments from the floor before we
close. Let us start with Hernan Marchant and hear a Chilean reaction.
Hernan Marchant, Santiago, Chile
First of all I would like to thank everyone. I think it has been a wonderful exchange.
I would like to thank Dino and Maria and the other members of the panel, and
especially Joaquim and all our Portuguese friends. I was trying to think about what
happened here, what in reality we have and we do not have in this process. I agree
with the idea that it is a matter of teaching an architecture; and if we look at what
we all presented here, I could see that teaching is a little bit outside the frame, and
that mainly there were proposals about architecture. I was trying to discover what
we can do to change that. The problem is that we are dealing with two things that
are constantly changing: architecture is changing and education is changing; and
education has many complicated things to solve, and now I realise that we were
mainly talking about a word, tools. But the word ‘tools’ is chiefly applied to certain
tools that develop forms and work with some software, etc., that go in one direction.
I think that when we have a problem to solve or when we have to understand some-
thing, it is not a tool that we need: it is a toolbox, which is not the same thing. To
have a toolbox means to have a set of tools that are oriented in one direction. When
we are working with mechanics, we need one kind of toolbox; when we are working
with wood, we need another kind of toolbox; but in this case we are working at the
same time with education and architecture, so we must build the categories of tools