Learning Process
Architecture is a cultural practice and a challenging, ever-evolving career path. The importance of designing the built environment is increasingly relevant in today’s world. Buildings impact our culture, our values, our social interactions, our daily activities, even our health and our lifestyles. An architectural education is meaningful in the 21st century because the process of learning to design involves complex problem solving, critical thinking, and visualization—much sought-after skills that can help society address important social, cultural, and environmental challenges and create an inclusive environment. At its core, architecture is a mix of art, science, social sciences, anthropology, history, theory, engineering, business, poetry, mathematics, and philosophy.The mission of the architecture program is to investigate critically the architectural systems and social forces that define sustainable built environments both locally and globally while honoring cultural identities through teaching, research, and practice.
Teaching architectural design is always strongly related to experimentation. Not only experimentation with forms to be created, with tools to be exploited, with means to be implemented, with materials to be used, with ideas to be formulated, with values to be expressed, or with principles to be forwarded. It is also related, to a great extent, to experimentation with forms of teaching, with the educational tools and means to be exploited, with the teaching strategies to be implemented, with the learning outcomes to be achieved, and with the values to be appropriated by the students. Sometimes this form of experimentation is aimed at the further development of an already implemented pedagogy in the framework of a particular approach to architecture and architectural design. In this case the experimentation is aiming at better teaching results; that is to say, at a further development of the way the contents and forms of expression of this approach are converted into teaching practices. The character of experimentation is not the same when we, as architects and teachers, are experiencing new understandings of architecture and we are considering other than the already established values, principles, and priorities in creating architectural forms. In cases of shifting paradigms, experimenting with architectural design in a school of architecture has a double dimension since it develops on two parallel levels: the one of creating innovative architectural forms and the other of implementing innovative forms of teaching students on how to create such forms.
The mental and operational landscape of our life is already dominated by the extended applications of digital technology. All the activities, in our everyday experience, are profoundly influenced by this new condition, which rapidly transforms our vision of things and of the world. Nowadays, the applications of digital technology are not only powerful devices constituting the main tool for designing, modeling, and manufacturing architectural forms. As tools are also a powerful, efficient, and meaningful medium for thinking about the field domain of their application, about the objects resulting from their use, about the subjects who choose to employ and who legitimize them as expressive signs manifesting a certain way of (re)conceiving, (re)thinking thinking, contemplating, and experimenting with contemplating architecture. In this revolutionary environment of information society architecture, as a cultural statement and manifestation of our life in space, seeks its redefinition and its reinvention as a new framework of values and principles, of knowledge, skills, and competences, of tools and means, of priorities and preferences, as a new paradigm.
New terms, notions, and concepts emerged in the architectural vocabulary:
liquid, hybrid, hyper, virtual, trans, morphogenetic, animation, seamless, skin, interactivity, parametric, nodes, machinic, morphing, self-generating, buildability, and so on. The consequence is that new values, new aesthetic principles, and new orientations and forms of experimentation are quickly and rapidly grounded in the consciousness of the architects and have a strong impact on architectural education and on the teaching process.
