478 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
goals of our teaching, what kind of students do we want to produce. And it is good that
we have variety. Not everyone should have an academic goal; not everyone should have
a professional goal; but we should maintain, I believe, these categories, professional,
research, theory and practice, because that is how the modern world works.
Joaquim Braizinha, Lisbon, Portugal
Thank you Maria. I would like to make a reflection on our emblem, which has the
attributes of the architect, the compass, the square and the sketch book, and which
projects, in the search that Constantin defined, an idea that is organised over a single
Platonic solid, a cylinder, which is perhaps looking to an idea projected in the sky. Our
angels today look to a screen, as Tiago told us; they narcissistically look to screens
where transformations appear over transformations, in exhibitions of effects. I think
that we are dangerously passing from a Platonic world to an Aristotelian world. A
Platonic world that has in fact finished, leaving us in an Aristotelian world where the
metamorphosis is the rule, the metamorphosis of everything, of every circumstance, of
every moment; and what we lose are the references. The Platonic world was very well
organised with precise references, but our world has lost the references. And if our
aliases, Tiago’s aliases passed through the screen to see what we lost as architects or
angels, I do not know, what we lost on the way, maybe we will find behind the screen
a lot of garbage, maybe compasses, squares and sketches, but maybe there are also a
lot of archetypal references that architects have always used and that today have no
more place in this world of swift transformations, metamorphosis over metamorphosis.
And I suppose that this is very dangerous. I know that our students will arrive today
in the university without their tools, to use that word; they no longer carry their
tools with them; they do not know them; and maybe if we want in fact to enter into
the Aristotelian world of the metamorphosis, we must teach them – this is after all
a pedagogic situation – or reveal to them the old archetypes, the old paradigms that
sustained our world. We cannot allow the lost definitiveness of our references or we
will lose our name, our reference, our identity.
Christian Fröhlich, Graz, Austria
Just a general comment. I do not know how many students are in this room – I
know there is one from Graz and there are some from Lisbon, and they have done a
wonderful job as supporters. But do you think that if students were taking part in
this workshop they would be reassured that their decision to study architecture was
a good one, that their teachers are all very cool and have brilliant ideas with which
to inspire them? Of course there is a little provocation in that question, but I did
not get the impression that all of us expressed that motivation. It looks to me that
every one of us has easy rules for how to teach architecture and just a few have to
do with the others. So it is hard to start a discussion if the content is that big. So
maybe the question is whether you are satisfied with the workshop?
Constantin Spiridonidis, Thessaloniki, Greece
There is no answer to this question. I suppose it tends to become a rhetoric one
because from the very beginning you know that there is no answer. But I think that
the useful thing that arises from this generality is that it is not possible to define a