Clossing Session 473
yesterday was dominated by answers, ideologies, structures of thinking. So that is
your project, and you have the tool to do it. And I have the same project and I can
do it completely differently.
Darren Dean, Kingston, United Kingdom
I just wondered whether the search for something is not embedded in the word
pedagogy, because does that little bit of it, agog, not mean to discover or to search?
I am wondering what that search is for and where that process actually ends. I am
thinking of this as a kind of lengthy discussion about the meaning of the word peda-
gogy, which also means a search or a discovery of something. The point I am trying
to make here is that there seem to be some people in the room or who came to this
conference that were concerned with meaning and some that were purely driven by
process. And I suppose, given that that is what your conference has thrown up, that
my question is: what do you think of it?
Christos Hadjichristos, Nicosia, Cyprus
Yes, I think I can say something related to that. Talking about processes we are
talking about understanding, how things develop, how things are worked out when
it comes to complexitrations. Cultures are those kinds of processes. I think one of
the debates that is rolling around the room is whether we are just one culture, just
another culture, or whether we are studying cultures. And I think resolving this can
help the question just posed by Darren Dean. Meaning, and I am referring to Antonino
Saggio, is something personal; it may be nomadic, it may be developed by a group, it
may be personal. But I think that if we develop forms that address meaningful groups
in a meaningful way, then which groups are we addressing? Are we educating people
to address specific groups? Or are we educating people to develop the way through
processes to manage to see how the cultures develop and what cultures need and
then to act as designers, as experts. And I think that was a question about whether
the schools of architecture that were presented have developed a similar language.
It appears to me that the answer is yes, because they seem to be addressing more
the formal aspect, and they are addressing their own meaningful content in their
own culture; and as architects I think we are still caught up in this problem, that
we are a culture. Instead of studying culture and cultural processes, in which case
Deleuze could become someone we could really learn from, we are basically acting
as a culture and a very conservative culture at that. So I think the shift would be to
use the tools we have to study processes through the information that we have. It
could be easier, through computers, but instead of doing that the danger is that we
just create another cultural language that has meaning only for a few.
Maria Voyatzaki, Thessaloniki, Greece
Thank you. Do we have any further comments?
Sean Hanna, London, United Kingdom
I do not know if this will go any way towards answering that question, but it is just
an analogy or a metaphor that I had in mind. Thinking about the analog and the
digital, not in the electronic or computational sense, but in relation to teaching, I