124 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
appeal to them, those that make sense, that provoke some type of stimulus, that
allow for the understanding of the topics that they are really interested in, in the
architectural development. Time plays a double role: On one hand time is the space
that passes, but it also turns into memory, into memories, and into the history of
the student.
Projecting and shaping from a close understanding of a corporeal experience
in a trip around a space, allows students the chance to open up to the things that
make them tremble, to search through their memory and memories, their fixations,
and to find what, in some ways, tells them who they are. To use the video camera to
experiment their spatial choices not only allows them to consciously connect with
the stimulus which a certain space provokes in the moving body, it also enables
them to register for the subsequent analysis, the varied characteristics of spaces
and its impacts on the project. Thus they are no longer spectators of their works,
but these arise from a deep analysis of the spatial sequences, of the proportions,
of the luminosity, and from everything that allows architecture to recover its focus
as a discipline that contains and receives the experiences of man. The time - space
relationship was the variable considered by the great architects, whose works, some
of them dating back almost 100 years, keep on being valid for the richness in their
understanding of formulation and spatial conception.
In current times, each person’s imaginary is nurtured by millions of stimuli. That
is why the imaginary changes from one society to another, from one period of time
to another and from one person to another. This is because regardless of the col-
lective history, each person has their own history, and their own way of processing
this history, being selective about the images, memories and memory that each one
of us keeps.
This reflection takes us to the third premise, the search for the imaginary that
represents the student. It is then, the first images that will determine some elements
that should necessarily be in the project, still alien to the structure, thread, relation
between them, etc. If you try to discover these first images, they appear without
any order of priority, because another characteristic of the personal imagination is
that there is no hierarchy, structure or order but complete simultaneousness. Despite
that, the images we save in our memory always have a meaning.
The studio must insist on stimulating the students in the search for a real sense of
space experience. With this purpose it is possible to use the new technological tools
that in current times are widely available, such as digital video and three-dimensional
visualizations. In the future it will be possible to add other tools, such as virtual
reality simulators, which today are too expensive.
The final reflection about the use of new teaching technologies in the studio
forces us to think that it is not enough to experiment with them, if there is no clarity
of what you want to achieve with their use.
“When it is known that by studying the regulation of movement man can live
in the same place, a relationship with space without charm or another even more
agreeable. When it is known that this regulation is the space for excellence in archi-
tecture and urbanism, you ask yourself the reason why so little attention has been
paid to this.”^10