460 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in PedagogyMaria Voyatzaki, Thessaloniki, Greece
With great relief, after a long two and a half days, we have come to the beginning
of the end; and since this is the beginning of the end, we probably should start from
the beginning. I say we, although I have not shared my thoughts with the others,
since we have no time to do that. So I will begin by giving my own thoughts before
passing the microphone to the other people who worked so hard for this to happen.
As a Greek I have an infatuation with plain words, and using this epilogue, or επίλογος,
as an apology, or απολογία, which I hope will not become a monologue, a μονόλογος,
I will try to grapple with the title, which we so struggled to come up with, so that
we can all recap on what we have come here for. Teaching and Experimenting were
the first two keywords of this title. With hindsight I would say they are probably
synonymous, or a tautologous grammatical phenomenon or structure. That is because
no one teaches us how to teach; therefore, when we teach we experiment. So when
we say teaching and experimenting, it is like saying teaching and teaching or experi-
menting and experimenting. That is a point of criticism that Kas Oosterhuis comes
to resolve, asking me what this is all about. And when I start giving Kas and Ilona
the title, they tell me that they do not experiment, they do projects. Then comes
the realisation that we have a puzzle with missing pieces that we have to try to fill
in during these two and a half days. Then along comes Constantin Spiridonidis, with
the reassurance that there is no problem, because we no longer teach on the basis of
problem-solving: the premise on which we base our educational activity, pedagogy
and teaching is the project. So there is no missing element any more because those
two have answered the question.
Then one can tackle the second part, that speaks of “Advances in Technology and
Changes in Pedagogy’. One could say after our discussions here that this is all about
societal changes rather than advances in technology, and that the contemporary
digital era is what accommodates these societal changes. Whether it is means, tools,
operations or systems that we have been going on about for the past two and half
days, which I will not get into because that is a long discussion in itself, I will say that
our job, since as educators we work with intuition and we experiment in what we do,
is, as it has been all along, to sense the societal changes of our time and see where
we stand. And I feel that the digital era is about information flow. We are in an age
where we have to deal with complexity much more than at any other time, because
of the speed that the digital era has imposed on the flow of information; therefore,
teaching architectural design is about teaching the complexity of how to manage infor-
mation. We are thus in a situation where we, along with the students and not before
the students and for the students, search for, generate, use and manage information.
Design and the building that comes from the design is a system of information that
flows in it, be it a process or a product. In this multifaceted, multi-layered situation
we experience seamless flows of information; we borrow, as we have always borrowed,
from other sciences; but we look at things, as Neil Leach mentioned a minute ago, in
different ways. We have different Derridian ways of reading information in different
ways, and we still borrow, as we will continue to borrow, from the Cartesian, Euclidian,
non-Euclidian, up to the five dimensions that are Marcus Novac’s premises. Maths has
always been used as a premise for architecture but it has been used differently; as
an attitude or a problem-solving activity in the 70s to current situations where we