Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design

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

Contemporary world finds us in a corner point where we deal with unprecedented
awareness with a general loss of unanimously accepted paradigms and shared values.
We live in the age of post-postmodernism, post-colonialism, post-imperialism, but
what meaning does this have just yet? Institutions, namely the disciplinary sacred
Academies have suffered a process of disaggregation, ultimately collapsing, and the
consistency of response they once offered and imposed through universal assessment
criteria has given way to an ambivalence difficult to cope with. Ambivalence appears,
as a matter of fact, not so much as transitional state but as a new fundamental
value, constraining both the experience of the present and the perspective towards
the future. It frames our citizenship and our self and mutual judgements, which now
explicitly embody within themselves their arguments and their contradictions at the
same time. This growingly verbalised ambivalence defines an underlay of constant
uncertainty and anxiety, a mist that filters our thought and our experience of life
and others.
It is time to deal with the possibility of this ambivalence being the new status
quo, the very essence of contemporary zeitgeist, perhaps embodying the new para-
digm itself.


Architecture, often referred to, especially among architects, as a sort of tool of
redemption, above life and its minor constraints, is in fact in the centre of life itself,
an expression of it, inevitably placed in the core of the turmoil of contemporariness.
The referential concepts in which it was based, taken for granted and thought to be
definable in themselves, will have to be rethought after having lost their aura of
absoluteness and their unquestionable status. The ongoing crisis claims for a deep
change in architecture education models and processes, which will have to be brought
to deal (perhaps for the firsts time) with the constantly relative and questionable
without an anchoring frame of solid references and to place themselves in a context
where the institutions that legitimised them have pretty much collapsed (at least
as accepted legitimizing committees). What is there to define then as constant and
stable in the context where facing? Only that very same relativity and questionability,
maybe needing to be looked at as the new possible operative referential.
Tools, methods of work and communication processes and pedagogic approaches
urgently need to incorporate this metabolism of change, walking along and embody-
ing, instead of fighting, that restless ambivalence. Architecture can no longer aspire
to be a refuge of stability and a lexicon of idealism: it must meet a society that deals
with paradox and with the juxtaposition of multiple discourses, gaining a certain flex-
ibility of discussion (of meaning, not merely of appearance) and committing itself to
communicate beyond the professional forums on a regular spontaneous basis.


The Individual Mythology – The Rebels and their Causes


The void left by the wear down of universal values and ideals pushed the individual
towards the vertigo that nourishes ambivalence and anxiety. Our position in the world
is defined within paradox and contradiction and, most importantly, experiencing a
constant questioning and perplexity, that no longer relies on a collective matrix to

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