Partnerships as a Pedagogical Strategy in Architectural Design III-UBI

Architectural Design presents a particularity in relation to the other disciplinesthat make any study plan of Architecture. Better known as “atelier”,Architectural Design is a potential laboratory in which professors and studentsinvestigate, reflect and produce architectural solutions for specificproblems. Usually, those solutions are the answer to programs for a theoreticalsubject, unreal, that ends up being taken as the reflection of each student,with subjectivity and desires of their own. In general, these eventuallydetermine the final result, after a monologue in which the constraints arelimited, in many cases, to the advices and guidance of teachers and to theinterpretation (more or less rigorous, depending on the convenience) of theregulations. In any case, the dynamic ends up not having, in general, morethan two actors: teacher and student. Decades of application of this pedagogicalsystem, and extended lists of schools as proof of this, demonstrateits reliability as strategy in teaching Project. But is this system the onlypossible? Is it enough? Does it provide to students the dimension of reality,characteristic of architecture?As a lab, immersed in a changing world and society, Architectural Designshould assume now other challenges: 1) search of new pedagogical strategies,capable of increasing the motivation of the architecture students, intensifyingthe dynamic “research-reflection-production” mentioned above;2) approximate those students to the community, allowing them to interactwith it not only as users, but as producers of solutions/answers.This abstract fits in the theme “Academia” and introduces two variablesin the debate: 1) innovation in the pedagogical strategies; 2) interaction ofthe architecture students with the community. It starts from the assumptionthat it is possible to introduce the “partnership” (with public and privateinstitutions, through a system of academic ideas contest) as “pedagogicalstrategy” in Architectural Design, being this strategy a “detonator” ofacademic responses with practical application for clients/partners of thereal world.As an example, will be presented the course of Architectural Design IIIUBI(Covilhã, Portugal), which structure born from the desire to constantlymotivate the students, proposing them challenges that transcend the merefact of meeting some academic obligations that end up being archived.It will reflect on some proposals unwrapped (by initiative of public/privatepartners; or proposed to these by the aforementioned course’s teachers).It is not intended to talk about the proposals themselves, but reflect on:the used work strategies teacher/student/partner, the achieved pedagogicalresults, the impact on the community, without leaving aside the legal voidthat underlies even in this type of work, which should be resolved in order toformalize the partnership as a pedagogical strategy in Architectural Design.

Volume Editors
Martha Thorne & Xavier Costa

ISBN
978-0-935502-83-1