Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design

294 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy

What the Lisbon conference effectively registered is the fact that a crucial language
modification – as Paul Valery sustained – directly regards also the contents that
language conveys.
Form/contents... an ancient querelle, strongly re-emerging today in the field of
architectural design, while information technologies are so rapidly spreading and
affirming themselves.

Those technologies indeed have surely brought – and the Conference confirmed it – a
new spirit and fresh ideas to the worn-down disciplinary debate and to the traditional
ways of its educational transmission. The possibility to build complex systems through
the definition, overlapping, articulation of several information layers opens to the
architect a huge perspective of solutions, suitable to be controlled not only in space,
but also in time, to be verified at interdisciplinary level, to be communicated and
corrected be the users, and to be controlled in their environmental consequences and
in their material and social impacts. An architectural object or the spatial configura-
tion, no more christalized in a static and permanent image, becomes, this way, the
result of a process through which the final form takes place, thou never permanent,
but mutable, flexible, intrinsically creative.

However, still the necessity remains to establish a rule in the design process, to spot
a route, to make a choice: it is at this point that the matter gets more difficult and
our love/hate for the values of modernity becomes more charming and ambiguous.
It is true that, since the middle of last Century, a refusal for the architecture of
modernity has grown: due to its despotic and paternalistic logic and to its results,
that were at the same time elitarian and stiff. But it is also true that its research of
a social equalitarian strategy, resulting in a research of modules and spatial rules,
remains unequalled.
For us it is difficult to give up, accepting as totally positive the valorisation of the
individual creativity - as has been for the Post-modern -, or the futuristic efficiency

• as has been for the high-tech hyper-functionalism.
  These, therefore, are the values that we are still used to build when we faithfully
  embrace the new information technology: no more assuming the sharing of collec-
  tive or collectivistic visions as constraints, but encouraging diverse and diversified
  behaviours, that are expression of unforeseen meanings, abilities of imagination and
  re-gained satisfaction in living together and enjoying places. Which in the end should
  represent the deepest meaning of a sustainable architecture.

I have found these meanings, these keys of interpretation in the Conference presen-
tations that have interested me most, and I think that what I have proposed in my
course at the Faculty of Architecture of the Polytechnic University of Milan (titled
“Sustainable Architecture”, and complementary to a Design Laboratory) are coherent
with them.
Here I wonder weather the meaning of “sustainability” is not already present in
some architectures of modernity I have always loved, sometimes belittled, uncomprised
or ignored by an architectural critique which is all oriented toward some hypotheses,
some dominant personalities. If this is the case, what an information, education
source do these architectures still constitute!