296 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
of our near past: where the results are obviously connected with the final formal
solutions and have to be found through a kind of deconstruction of architecture
itself, according to the concepts listed above, mainly aimed at the enhancement of
users’ comfort.
By this insight a very rich and interesting general view arises that sheds light on
what awful simplification has been operated by the criticism of also very important
scholars about that so rich and useful research. Which, in a new reading, shows not
only many important aspects which the current disciplinary interpretation obscures,
but also gives us many tools for a deeper understanding of contemporary architec-
ture, where obviously the connection between building and the environment is much
more dramatized.
So we discuss and carefully redesign the achievements in techniques and technolo-
gies in the buildings by Sverre Fehn and Alvaro Siza, Thomas Herzog and Georg Rein-
berg, Toyo Ito and Kazuyo Sejima, Herzog&de Meuron and Renzo Piano, Lacaton&Vassal
and Lucien Kroll...; achievements that should not be read only as a personal gesture,
but mainly as signs of a deep research in the direction of sustainable architecture:
for their connection with the culture and the experiences of local traditions, for their
attention to the inhabitants’ participation to the design processes, for the general
new vision of the environment and its identification as a necessary reference for a
different future human presence.
Figure 4
Alvaro Siza, Malagueira Estate,
Evora, Portugal, 1977.Figure 5
Imre Macovecz, Cultural Cen-
tre, Bak, 1985-1988.