Opening Session 19
to tell them to make the most of this meeting, for it will give them the opportunity to
talk to people who are very much involved in architecture and very much involved in
teaching. So welcome to our University and, as Professor Braizinha said, enjoy Lisbon,
enjoy Portugal, and enjoy the meeting, and let me ask for a round of applause for the
organisers because if things go well it is because we have good organisation, and in this
case I am sure that the Portuguese and the Greek organisers have done a very thorough
job and I think that we should express our thanks with a round of applause. Thank you
very much.
Joaquim Braizinha, Lisbon, Portugal
I would like to invite Professor Per Olaf Fjeld to say a few words. For those of you who do
not know, he is the president of the European Association for Architectural Education.
Per Olaf Fjeld, Oslo, Norway
Thank you Professor Braizinha for hosting us and for the generosity you have extended
to us in this beautiful city and this beautiful university. Thank you for that: we certainly
felt the warmth of your welcome immediately, and I cannot think of a better place to
have such an event. I also want to most warmly thank Constantin Spiridonidis and Maria
Voyatzaki, who have been doing this for fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years with the same
passion, and I think the same pleasure, and certainly with the same professionalism. It
is a very generous effort that has been going on over a very long time.
Our attitude towards space has changed. There is no doubt about that. The way
we use space, the way we see space, our perception of space is not the same as it was
ten, fifteen or twenty years ago. How aware we are within that change and within the
relationship between what was and what is going to be I am not entirely sure, but I will
argue that our sense of space has changed. And to teach architectural design today is
an enormous challenge. It is, however, an enormous challenge that I enjoy every day.
Within each challenge there is also an eagerness to understand more about architectural
space and the way in which that space can be better understood. As the invitation said, it
is certain that design is experimental today, but at the same time architecture is rooted
in conditions from which it is not able to escape. It is rooted to place, to materiality and
also in some way to the necessity to have a capacity for use. Within this experimenta-
tion, it is not just openness but also a resistant force or forces that we have to respect.
It is very interesting that there has always been a relationship between the tools that
we are using, the process and the product. It is a relationship that has always been
there, but today our tools are much stronger than before. They have the ability to act
in a certain way. You might say that to some extent they are an extension of our body,
or that there is a strong relationship or a duality between the tools we use and our own
body. I do think that the better we understand this duality between the machine on the
one hand and our body on the other, the stronger the possibility that we will be able
in some way to move architecture forward. As I say, it is a search, an experiment with
many different levels that we are working with; but at the same time, if we are going to
be honest we also know that this search has within itself no particular direction: it is
characterised more by openness than by any particular direction. In that sense, we can
ask whether the search is directed within the idea of transformation, of the existing;
are we searching for a new architecture per se, or are we searching for expressions in