Clossing Session 465
From my point of view, the question I asked yesterday was purely rhetorical. It is
twenty-seven years since Alvin Toffler wrote his fundamental book, The Third Wave.
Toffler’s point is, I think, perfectly familiar: that we are in a completely different
age of humanity, because production systems are based on the value of information.
Information is in everything; it is the element that increases economic value. This is
old news, and from my point of view it is absolutely a given that we are in a different
moment in the history of humanity.
The second concept, again pretty straightforward for me, is science; and in this
case to some extent we can certainly see pedagogy as part of that, which at a certain
point tried to adapt, tried to change a bit in order to respond to circumstances. But
that is not always possible. There are moments when jumps must be made, and this
is basically what this point is about. Now, when I was commenting on the different
pedagogical systems that have been shown in the presentations yesterday, what I
noticed was that the pedagogical systems that we focused on represented important
shifts in their times, shifts that were made in order to respond to major shifts in
society and major shifts in the economic way of building value. We do not under-
stand anything about the burning of the Polytechnic if we do not understand what
happened at that moment of modernisation, of political, economical and industrial
revolution, and so on. We do not understand anything about the Bauhaus pedagogy
if we do not understand what was happening at that time. So this is a key point
in what we are discussing; from my point of view, what is really interesting is not
only the experimenting, the teaching and the way of being updated that Dino talked
about, which is fascinating, of course, but it is not the core. The core for me is the
changes in pedagogy. This is what I am really interested in, and this as I see it is
what our round table is about.
Now, just one small thing. It is not an accident that I call my book series IT
Revolution in Architecture; these things are consistent. We believe that there is a
paradigmatic shift in the old society and that architecture has to be revolutionised.
That is why we called it IT Revolution in Architecture back in 1997. We have done
31 books in this series, as some of you know; these are the last seven, which are
available, unfortunately, only in Italian. Anyway, let us try to build what from my
point of view, because this is a chance for sharing ideas, could be this new pedagogy
in a moment of cultural shift and paradigmatic shift, because of the relevance of
information technology. This, then, is the second part of the talk. I am interested
in understanding what kind of new pedagogy we can imagine, because we have to
imagine it first, in order to make the shift that, I think, is a fact. I do not know
how many of you were in Venice with us, but in Venice we built an important piece
of this, all together; and I assume that this is in some way a continuation of the
discussion we had in Venice. You may remember that I showed this image in Ven-
ice as an example of a very hierarchical approach to something that needs a much
more deductive, iterative and spiral approach in teaching and in other things that
we discuss, such as the relevance of information as Maria beautifully put it in the
beginning, and other issues.
Now let us come to Oliver. There is a very beautiful movie that was made very
recently, in Italian; I do not know if it is going to be translated into English: I hope
so, but it will probably share the same fate as my seven books. The title of the movie