334 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
derive from new and correspondent languages and modus operandi. New media serve
with almost perverse perfection the iconic dimension given to (and demanded from)
architecture, making it easy to become an accomplice of inconsistency and deceiving
visual seduction. Technology has to be introduced with a systematic understanding of
its disciplinary, multidisciplinary, transversal implications, nourishing its operative-
ness with content and methodological consequence.
Facing this context the teacher must deal with media and technology as a struc-
tural underlay of people’s, namely students’, thought and perception of the real, which
pedagogically means that not only practical methods change but work discussion and
assessment is also radically different. As it has repeatedly been said, we are watch-
ing at the growth if a generation with a whole new set of physical and mental limbs
and with a clear, although maybe not conscious, perception of technology playing a
central role in experiencing reality and defining subjects as individuals. If now there
seems to be an overlay of different ways technology is approached and recognised
as a more or less decisive factor in our lives, in the medium term all active subjects
will have always lived with it (and trough it).
Architecture, both as a discipline and as a framework for living and being, in
inevitably not addressable in the same way it used to be when life itself and our
individual and social identity aren’t either. Teaching and discussing architecture is
necessarily drawn to the core of the mutation of fundamental concepts such as form,
space, program, structure, continuity, placement, etc., catalysed and conditioned by
technology and media, and must be aware and engaged with the practical reflections
of this debate.
Teacher – Tutor of Self Questioning: Confronting the Rebel
In the absence of validated and established answers and criteria, the dynamics of
discourse (may it be between teacher and student or among professionals) has been
given a major role in architecture practice. The teacher no longer appears as guard-
ian of an academic model; exercising a dialogic pedagogy is now the only possibility
of effectively assessing that much larger array of required competences and skills.
Pedagogy is shifting from an institutional based model to focus on personal commit-
ment and on the teachers’ (together with the students’) responsibility, creativity and
shared engagement. The teacher should willingly assist the student in the complex
process of shaping an individual narrative by identifying the idiosyncrasies that will
ultimately make each work coherent and serve as singular essential references in the
development of a working method. The teacher’s theoretic and practical knowledge
and experience must emerge alongside to confront the solidity and logical evolution
of each student’s line of thought and methodological procedures, and will appear
as relevant pedagogic tools not because they are institutionally framed (which they
simply won’t be) but because they are already a direct result of the teacher’s own
self confrontation and criticism.
He/she must place himself in the convergence of the students’ working methods
and respective results, demanding a clear mental mapping of the language and syntax
being put together, by this mean catalysing the students’ need for self awareness