Debate on the papers of Session 1 91
teachers are able to transmit an energy. If they gave me Deleuze I would not know
what to do with it, but it is clear from this fantastic final presentation that wonderful
things can happen, not because of Deleuze but because of the combination of this
professor and whatever she loves – that is the issue about teaching. So do not be
trapped in abstract discussions that are of no real significance Deleuze is important
for her and she is able to build around it, but for another person it means nothing,
and that too is perfectly fine.
Moving on to another issue, I think the title of the conference has been very well
framed, but we have to pay a little bit of attention to it. “Teaching and Experimenting
with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy”. Fine.
We can discuss that all day, going into all the details, etc.; but the real essence is not,
from my point of view, the advances themselves but our changes in pedagogy; these
are what are interesting in reality. And I think we should make some kind of effort in
this discussion to focus on this to a certain extent. We should focus on the changes in
pedagogy, and then we can continue talking about all our fascinating experiments,
and I am sure that we have a lot to learn from each other, from our different fields. And
so in order to steer the thinking in this direction I have to come back to what Per Olaf
Fjeld said at the beginning of our session. He made two very important points that I
would like to rephrase as questions addressed to everyone on the panel here, because
I think that if we try to answer these questions we will start to understand some very
important issues, namely the changes in pedagogy and the changes in pedagogy as
implications that have to do with politics, the economy, strategy, and so on. These are
extremely important.
So what are the two basic questions that I share absolutely with Per Olaf? First of
all, Per Olaf said that he has the feeling that the idea of space is changing, that what
we are used to defining as space is not the same thing that previous generations were
working with. Now this is absolutely a key question. Lately I have been doing confer-
ences only on that point. What is the new condition of space? Why does it change? How
we are going to rethink it? How we are going to go about teaching and experimenting
with it? This is a very important point, I think, with regard to changes in pedagogy, and
it also has to do with technology and at the same time with some basic philosophical
thinking. The second important question is the relevance of tools to the basic very
powerful idea that there is a strong relationship between the tool and the product. It
is like a Möbius strip: you cannot separate the tool from the product, the vision from
the way to look at it. And then there is a third, even more important question, which
is: what do we do with it? So it seems that we have a new idea of space and we have
a new tool to pursue it with, but why, in the end, why do we want to do this? What
is the purpose, or the many purposes? Per Olaf mentioned a multiplicity of choices.
Some hypotheses were also advanced during the discussion: for example, the idea of
embracing the other, which is a very strong statement. We may also look at it from the
point of view of how we use it in various circumstances, how we can address crises,
how with all this effort, this understanding of new space, new technology, new tools,
we can deal with this crisis.
Anyway, to go back and phrase it very simply, I think it would be interesting if some
person on the panel tried to answer whether there is a new vision of space, whether
there is a new tool, and what do we do with it?