School of Architecture(s) - New Frontiers of Architectural Education

The word impact in research highlights the evidence, the results or consequences of a study on some specific contextual factors. There are many other definitions of impact, such as the one used by the University of Scotland to highlight its contribution to the areas of “Innovation, Architecture and Design”. The report presents the impact as benefits to people as architecture and design stakeholders. On the other hand, the AIA (The American Institute of Architects) asserts that research related to the built environment is underfunded, considering its impact on the economy, human condition, and society at large.

Engaging in speculative endeavors beyond the confines of academia entails a deliberate focus on forging novel trajectories within the cognitive and knowledge-production realms of architectural research. It can be understood as an approach where research acts as a continuous path of inspiration and not (only) as a procedural tool for academic advancement. Within architectural doctoral studies, research by design and design driven research emerge as attitudes towards incorporating the artistic design processes in research, trespassing the scope of architectural research within academic boundaries.

Within the general frame of the conference enquiring about the plurality of architecture as a discipline, the two sessions dedicated to the ways of teaching specifically addressed the different teaching approaches questioning two of the six dichotomies characterizing the contemporary debate on architectural education. The first tension explored is the supposed opposition between architecture considered as a discipline, with its specific field of knowledge and epistemology, and, on the other hand, architecture is regarded as a method, a mindset, a modus operandi that can be applied to other fields than the built environment. The second dichotomy concerns the origin of architectural education which can be grounded on the study and imitation of the Masters of Architecture, as it was when architecture was taught in the frame of the École des Beaux-arts, or can be grounded in training the student to face specific topics or burning issues of the architectural discipline.

The latest research we conducted involved designing a tool to support the pin-up format, which is used to increase the effectiveness of the presenting/commenting activity as the main activity of project-expositions in architectural education. This research provided clues about the roles that students prefer to have as architects. Being a “Master” who has an extraordinary level of proficiency, skills, or performance in the information age can be stressful for students. We questioned the relationship between self-efficacy and the pin-up format, considering the students’ experiences with project-expositions. To understand the relationship between students’ social intentions, feelings, and the spatial organization during pin-up events, we monitored their emotions and thoughts about presenting their projects through a survey and some random interviews conducted over time. As the stress factor in project-expositions is directly related to the well-being of students, we focused on the emotional aspect of well-being. We were excited to learn that students expect peer-learning from pin-up activities, and that self-efficacy is an outcome of this. The survey was conducted in the Danish context during the Spring semester of 2023. The data collected can be considered informative because the 2nd year students represented a variety of nationalities and genders. This research establishes a strong foundation for asking the question, through the lens of well-being, of how pedagogical approaches in architectural education should be designed to support students in becoming either “Masters” or “self-efficacious architects.”

In a fading material culture, where societies have become far from making and only content with image approximations, architectural education, no exception, is suffering from the absence of visual, haptic, and hands-on knowledge. When pairing the knowledge of materials with its related issues of resource depletion, climate change, and waste, a new seed for teaching architecture is ready to be planted. This paper will focus on a profound distinction between two opposing design methodologies: a conventional method and an unconventional one tested in an architectural design studio environment and can be replicated, reused, and scaled to any architectural education programs worldwide. The aim of this study is to challenge the mainstream model of design in architectural education, provide a resource-based material culture, and highlight the role of design in mitigating climate change. Results shows that the understanding of the properties of materials, evaluating the economic and environmental aspects were critical to achieve the sought learning outcomes.

In Architecture and urban design education, critique it is hard to find anymore: it does seem lost in the call for a renewed disciplinary autonomy, localised territorial interests and the sole artistic and sovereign agency of the maestro: it seems hidden in the sustainability solutionism or reduced to margins, the sole negative with its arrogant tone, stripped from the forms of seminars and discussions and forced to be ancillary to design studios extremisms. The same happen to any form of critical theory, being marxist, relegated to its obsolescence, feminist labelled as activist and anti disciplinar or decolonial, still misjudged as infused in the call of social justice and exoticism. Starting from these assumptions and grounding the reflections in the pedagogical experiences of the author, the paper ask how is then possible to reconfigure critique in the present within a planetary catastrophe in which design is always/already implicated and entangled? What visions of critique are required to intervene into the tangle of ecological, economic, cultural, and sociopolitical conditions of today? What form this could take in architectural and urban design education? Mobilising a Foucault definition of critique as gesture that arrest, disorganise, denaturalise and dehegemonise and expanding it with a partial reading of abolitionist literature.

Architectural practice is influenced by all the dynamics of daily life, such as climate change, pandemics, political changes, economic issues, globalization, and social inequalities, so the roles and responsibilities of the architect have also changed. As a result, the practice and architecture discipline have been compressed into a narrow field, and it can be called a crisis. Some educators act more rationally and dynamically, taking structural and spatial initiatives to work out these crises on the spot by overcoming economic, political, or regulatory conjunctures like design-build studios. Nonetheless, in traditional studio practice, professionals produce intellectual content and projects based on architectural knowledge by addressing these issues in a more philosophical or political on paper. By comparing these two design studio modalities through literature and case studies, this paper will explore how an inclusive, socially engaged, anti-crisis design practice in architectural education can be addressed in the curriculum, how it can find an answer in design pedagogy, and how we can make it sustainable in the future of the discipline. This research will take these two avenues of approaching these crises and compile their potential contributions toward developing a responsive, resilient, and inclusive habitus-of-learning approach for architectural education.

The transformation of non-heritage protected mid-twentieth century European architecture, especially public housing, is a key contemporary issue that raises several architectural, environmental and social questions. While several examples show the potential for transformation, demolition is unfortunately still considered commonplace, leading not only to the loss of architectural heritage and affordable housing, but also to the destruction of communities built over decades. In this context, architects have an important role to play in proposing alternatives. Within the framework of architectural schools, and in addition to design-based strategies, it seems necessary to confront students as well with a critical analysis of complex demolition processes in theoretical courses. The course “Transformation Strategies” at the HEIA-FR proposes collective research aimed at questioning demolition processes, and at developing a sensitive approach and methodology to reveal architectural, environmental and social values as a basis for the transformation of mid-twentieth century architecture. The first case study aims to question the ongoing demolition process in the Toulouse Le Mirail district, designed by Candilis, Josić and Woods in the 1960s.

The aim of the current study is to explore creative labour production and reproduction processes in architectural design studios in Brazil, UK, Belgium and Italy. In contrast to free autonomy narratives, participant observation has evidenced three conflicting mechanisms in creative labour processes, namely: subjectification, distinction and hierarchical expropriation. This issue is pivotal in a transition period-of-time when architecture confronts the myths of geniuses and focuses on knowledge exchange paradigms. Architecture was not herein approached as substance nor as form (an immutable essence and ideal), rather, it was explored as processes engaged with discipline and dialectics. Discipline was investigated based on the Grounded Theory used to code conflicts and recurrences by focusing on how it reinforces subjectivities and practices. In addition, Action Research was used to explore architecture’s social dialectics by focusing on collaborative methodologies and on how architecture (re)produces ways of seeing by revealing (visualizing hidden properties), imagining (conceiving future scenarios) and refunding (articulating virtual seeds for shared social realities). Results have indicated proposals to result from collaborative work, subjectivities to be enclosed in hegemonic narratives, fantasies to hide the actual collective process of production, and allegedly individual creations to be forms of fetish. This finding suggests a paradigm transition still in course, with overlapping conflicts between invention and labour, competition and collaboration, distinction and collective dialogue, as well as seductive narratives and negotiated practices.

The authors discuss a pedagogical experiment that arises out of an ongoing Erasmus+ project titled “Socially Situated Architectural Pedagogies” or SArPe, which involves the Universities of Pavia, Istanbul, TU Delft and Malaga. SArPe project situates itself in between three areas of inquiry: critical/radical pedagogies [1–4]; situated knowledge [5, 6] and commons-oriented knowledge and pedagogy [7–9].On that basis, the paper aims to critically analyze architectural pedagogy through authors’ positioning in respect to the wider debate and a case study-based approach. Namely, a second-year architectural studio held at the University of Pavia in a.y. 2022–2023. Here the studio is reimagined as a site for commoning of knowledge through collaborations with non-academic actors; challenging hierarchical position between learners and educators; and experiment practice of dialogue.By doing that, it seeks to broaden reflections on how architectural studio can reconnect to the outside world and, more particularly, how learners and educators (and their mutual positioning) engage with non-institutional stakeholders.As such a transformative-relational pedagogy is experimented, which activates the traditional studio towards a socially situated pedagogical practice that promotes self-organization, encourages active participation and destabilases hierarchies.

The introduction of computer-aided design (CAD) programs marked a significant shift in architectural practice, with professionals transitioning from hand drawing to digital tools. This evolution sparked debates on the implications of technology for the quality and authenticity of design. Today, artificial intelligence (AI) presents a similar challenge, raising questions about its advantages and disadvantages in architectural education. This paper aims to investigate the impact of AI on architectural pedagogy, exploring both its potential benefits and the concerns it raises. The research will propose strategies for integrating AI tools into architectural curricula, emphasizing their role as an aid to human creativity and problem-solving rather than a replacement. The study will argue that adapting to AI technologies is crucial for preparing students for the future of architectural practice and ensuring they are equipped to utilize the full potential of these tools while maintaining ethical and responsible design approaches, to use the tools by being pro-active rather than passive.

The origin of academic architectural education can be found in the inauguration of the Académie d'Architecture in 1671 in France based on the idea of knowledge as the transmission of a ‘style’. This idea continues to characterize contemporary architectural education but in a different way, through the pursuit of a personal aesthetic expression or in the satisfaction of real estate and construction market requirements as a cynic acceptance of reality. To conceive architectural education only as serving the market is to lose the meaning of architecture itself as a way to design, and improve, humanity. The contemporary age is characterized by the notion of fragility that represents the many uncertainties of our time related to different issues involved in politics, economy, energy, ecology, and demography. In the field of architecture and urban design, the main causes of fragility come from the phenomena of planetary urbanization and climate change that are visible in disaster, migration, periphery, inequality, diversity, and planetary crisis. While the ‘Academié’ model of education is founded on the knowledge of historical buildings in their aesthetical prerogatives, an architectural education focused on the contemporary issues of fragility needs to be based on the knowledge of projects that faced these challenges, to define a conceptual framework of a new agenda with new theories, technics, and references. Teaching architecture in the age of fragility means promoting the critical role of architects inside, and for, human society through projects of adaptation, hospitality, community, process, coexistence, and imaginary.

By presenting examples from Making is Thinking and other educational initiatives in the architecture programme at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU, this paper points to why risk-taking is especially needed in architectural education today, as global crises demand new and critical ways of working with architecture. From a Scandinavian horizon, the paper problematizes the paradox that educational systems instead of promoting education as the uncertain and troublesome business it is, tend to please students in their longing for predictability. The paper describes risky learning spaces where learners start by doing, preferably in teams and off campus, thereby counteracting predictability and opening up for unexpected mishaps to occur – mishaps with innovative potential. The paper shows that such risky learning spaces introduce collective, emotional and embodied dimensions in architectural education. Moreover, the paper contributes with experience-based knowledge regarding how trust – a precondition for risk-taking and a notion underexplored in research on higher education – may be established in educational settings. Building on the idea of a fruitful tension between risk and trust in educational spaces, the paper ends with a list of gutsy proposals for a pedagogy of mistakes. *“Big beautiful mistakes” is an expression used with inspiration from architect and educator Sami Rintala.

Transformations of public spaces are an integral part of city life. These processes although addressing site specific problems are universal for the urban centres across European countries struggling with deurbanization, social exclusion, massive tourism, climate change and pollution. The study is based upon the outcomes of the series of international workshop showing the approach to public space in different location. The aim of research is to show what problems addressed during the design workshop had a universal dimension and which ones were more site specific, addressing the needs of the local community. The basic research question asked was also how to transform public space in order to create active, reach, inclusive and climate neutral environment for the inhabitants. What are the factors in the public space creation that would result in active public space? The research methodology was based on a multi-criteria comparative analysis of activation factors in selected public spaces and evaluation of students’ proposals ac-cording to those factors. These transformations were often driven by specific objectives, such as creating iconic landmarks, improving public safety, or generating economic activity on the other hand some of the proposals were concentrating on local community needs introduced by the meetings with local stakeholders. A hybrid approach that combines the strengths of both approaches provided by the workshop methodology was proved effective didactic method.

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive and critical assessment of the outcomes stemming from a Design-Build program, a pedagogical approach widely adopted by educational institutions worldwide. These programs are instrumental in equipping students with vital practical skills, often unattainable within the confines of a conventional studio environment. While the objectives of this program align with those of similar initiatives in various educational institutions, an examination reveals an unexpected and substantial outcome. Beyond its primary goals, the Design-Build program has played an integral role in instilling a culture of collaboration and camaraderie within the school, thereby significantly contributing to the overall success of its architectural education. All stages of the program consist of collaborative processes, instilling from an early age the importance of working together by helping each other than individual competition.

Architecture is identified by its presence, its perceived reality. Architecture study is research in essential, defining values of architecture. Within multitude of discipline’s constitutive elements, the objectification of architecture’s perceived state is still one of its vital and specific tasks. No matter technology, economy or social normative imperatives, architecture is aestheticized, reflective research. A meaningful creative act no matter of aesthetic code or material circumstances. Architecture’s immaterial, yet identifying difference is processed by exact conceptual decisions. Study of architecture must sustain a course where a working process is identified as a concept of work itself, where ephemeral emerges out of exact, conceptual execution. Ephemeral is a perceived state, it requires a sensitive person. In time of study, the search of ephemerality through tectonics of architecture lesson is sensitizing pedagogical tool. It is a foundation for architecture’s cultural and human role. In times of intertwining disciplines, architecture must keep tools for protecting its disciplinary identity and intangible, defining differences. A course unit where precise and consistent production leads to authentic if ephemeral presence is valuable tool for affirmation of Architecture’s immaterial, unmeasurable identity.

The Thesis Seminar “Theory and Critique of Architectural Action” is a multidisciplinary educational experience designed to explore the methodological aspects associated with the development of a research project in architectural design, with a focus on Master’s Degree Graduation. The Seminar identifies six key methodological issues in research related to project practices and approaches them from a multidisciplinary perspective, subjecting each component to critical examination. Through lectures and Seminar meetings, each discipline challenges these issues based on its scientific status, providing specialized disciplinary insights. In doing so, the Seminar equips students with the necessary theoretical and practical tools to test the application of a robust methodological structure to address various challenges arising from the real world in their research activities. The structure of the Seminar is not intended to establish a specific sequence among the research activities object of inquiry, nor does it seek to offer exhaustive solutions to every issue raised. Instead, the Seminar’s aim is to provide students with critical and methodological instruments within a collegial space for open discussion and debate. The pedagogical objective is to enable students to critically evaluate and systematize interdisciplinary knowledge and skills acquired during their previous academic journey, allowing them to position original research programs within the broader framework of design practice.

This paper is the result of forty dialogues conducted during my PhD research, which took place between 2018 and 2020, among students and educators’ of the Nordic Baltic Academy of Architecture. These conversations were initiated by three questions: What skills should students have after studying architecture? How should these skills be taught? How can architectural education be of special importance to our society? The answers to these questions were analysed and interpreted by following the Grounded Theory approach. What emerged from these dialogues is the shared conviction to use architectural education as a complex project to advance the knowledge, traits, attitudes, values, and behaviours necessary to respond to global challenges whilst creating conditions for students and their educators to locally engage as active citizens. This combination of global awareness and local activism is at the base of formulating the Theory of Cosmopolitan Citizenship in Architectural Education whose purpose is to help students and educators cultivating a language, activating a pedagogy, and developing a scholarship capable of advancing new political agencies to codesign healthier, safer, and a fairer world in a changing social, ecological, and political environment.

Architectural pedagogy in rural areas necessitates a thoughtful consideration of both methodological and disciplinary approaches within the educational process. Is it enough to define the way of teaching Architecture as a method or as a discipline? In a constantly changing world, facing multiple fragile conditions (e.g., environmental crisis, social disparities, demographic changes), the way of teaching, and learning, architecture shall consider over-coming this narrow boundary. An effective balance between method and discipline is needed, where architectural pedagogy should be responsive to the variations of fragile territories and communities. This capability enables students and rural communities involved to develop more sensitivity to context, recognizing which design solutions are best tailored to their realities. Inner areas, for instance, which suffer from constant depopulation and lack of connection, though rich in historical/natural heritage, are entangled in a complex multiplicity of design scenarios. Especially in Italy, whose territory is 60% made of inner areas [1], this condition should be approached by universities for the architects of the future. Moreover, architectural pedagogy in rural areas should carefully consider the interplay between method and discipline as a participatory; a community-oriented method allows the co-creation of contextually relevant solutions within the educational process of teaching architecture. The contribution proposes a view on this challenge, in which architectural education has a profound role in shaping a desirable future, starting from the ongoing experiences developed in some inner areas case studies, such as the one of Vione (Valle Camonica, Lombardy) and of Morino (Valle Roveto, Abruzzo).

Teaching architecture as general education serves various purposes. Studying familiar buildings may become an intriguing introduction to liberal arts, including art, history, and natural and social sciences. Students can learn critical thinking, problem-solving, and interdisciplinary communication when studying architecture, which are vital higher education goals nowadays. Architecture students and other majors studying together may also improve the future mutual understanding between architects and clients. Housing and living environments are so essential that various efforts are made to teach them to children. Still, primary and secondary school teachers need more time, experience, or confidence to teach such a vast and technical subject. Architecture professors and practitioners can take it over in higher education. To examine the feasibility of this proposal, the author gave a 100-min online experimental lecture on introductory architecture to 1600 first-year students in different majors and conducted a quantitative text analysis on post-learning evaluation. The result proves that practical topics such as safety and environmental preservation interested students regardless of the major. However, a questionnaire survey revealed that students are much less interested in their living environment than in food and clothing. We ought to think about how to make them aware of the importance of this subject.

Can Architecture be produced without an architect? Yes. It has always been like this. The historic centers of our cities are the result of designs whose authors are often unknown, not because they are not essential but because they are unnecessary [1]. The interest of architects, but not only in authorship, dates back to the nineteenth century, a period of excellent building ferment in which incredible urban transformations sanctioned the idea of the house as a consumer good [2].

The paper raises questions about the extent to which architectural research can function as a tool for challenging power dynamics and facilitating a critique of capitalism. This aligns with the assertion by Meiksins Wood that such a critique of capitalism “requires a constantly renewed critique of the analytic instruments designed to understand it” [1]. In the final chapter of “Critique of Architecture,” Spencer, in an interview with Kosec, asserts that architecture serves as the central and foundational arena for education, surveillance, and discipline [2]. Within this context, the paper seeks to explore this question by offering a critical examination of the recent participatory research project “Architectures of Care”. This project involved the mapping of social and environmental care practices within three self-organized communities in Italy, Turkey, and the UK. The paper will particularly focus on the challenges associated with conducting research through participatory methods, wherein participants become co-researchers. Additionally, it will address the controversial role of the “neutral researcher” within this framework. The “Architectures of Care” project provides valuable insights that contribute to the discussion of whether architecture can foster caring environments. Furthermore, it prompts reflection on the significance of involving self-organized communities in our research agenda. These communities are perceived as non-commodified agents that have the potential to challenge prevailing power structures, establish networks of care, and facilitate radical forms of social emancipation [3].

This research text explores the miscellaneous roles of more-than-living (non-living and hybrid) constituents within the pedagogical universe of architectural studios, highlighting their progressive potential to transform educational practices towards more inclusive, emancipatory, and experimental directions. Through an in-depth analysis of diversified pedagogical experiments, from the Radical Pedagogies selection of the late 20th century to the contemporary approaches presented in the 2022 ABC-Architecture Beyond Capitalism School, the research illuminates how more-than-living constituents act as catalysts for new subjectivities and pedagogical methods. The research endeavors to reveal the transformative and progressive potential of more-than-living constituents through their contextual and performative actions in their political, spatial, and networked positions. Unlike the majority of studies on studio pedagogies that primarily focus on the power dynamics and hierarchical tendencies between participants/students and facilitators/instructors, this research underscores the overlooked significance of spatial arrangements, collective experiences, open-source strategies, and other factors. By integrating these constituents, the text aims for a pedagogical approach that embraces dissolved physical/mental boundaries and all modes of action, facilitates equitable power dynamics, fosters a critical engagement with pressing contemporary issues, opens up new avenues for critical-creative exploration, and promotes acts of resistance and resilience within the studio atmosphere.

This paper aims to present action research experiences in Romanian context and reflection on possible contributions from architectural education to helping neighborhood communities. For the Bucharest team of ATU- Association for Urban Transition, the project entitled Urban Education Live - Innovative Urban Education in Live Settings (2018–2020) was about applying social mapping tools for helping a civic initiative group to define a common agenda that was presented to the local authorities as the first neighborhood development plan in Romania. A new project entitled CoNECT - Collective Networks for Everyday Community Resilience and Ecological Transition was initiated in 2022 and it is aiming to identify collaboration mechanisms among various stakeholders for helping grass-roots initiatives addressing transition challenges to have more visibility and impact. Both projects are implemented in the framework of the Urban Europe Joint Partnership Initiative as a research program demonstrating a solid concern for the social impact of research on communities. Research on connections between space and communities means testing ideas and tools coming from the training of built environment professionals and helping neighborhood communities and master students to work together on concrete objectives and formats. By doing so, architects and other professionals learn how to offer their support in building bridges between grass roots initiatives and decision-making processes since these formats are the ones used to plan and design interventions for transforming spaces.

The paper aims to explore the potential of research by design in architecture and visual arts. The main objective of the paper is to analyze the different models and epistemological positions advanced in the academic milieus as far as doctoral research by design is concerned, to explore the differences and similarities between research by design in the field of architecture and in the field of visual arts. Even though the research by design in the fields of architecture and visual arts is focused on the production of knowledge through visual, associative, and experimental research, the models of research by design in visual arts differ from those prevailing in architectural programs. The paper focuses on a corpus of models of doctoral research by design carried out within different university programs in schools of architecture and visual arts, and various multi-university and supra-disciplinary programs (architecture and visual arts) which share the intention to develop their research projects through creative practice. Two questions to which this paper aims to respond are the following: Under which circumstances and conditions a work in the field of architecture (drawn, graphic, or con-structed) or its formulation (verbal or written) can be recognized as active in the constitution of knowledge? What are the modes of inquiry specific to architectural and artistic practices that make it possible to build knowledge that can be transmitted and shared?

The main question of this paper is related to whether and in what way we understand the notion of topological deformability, which appears in numerous texts of architectural theory from the beginning of the 1990s until today. In general, the paper deals with the problem of the denotation of concepts from other scientific fields, and shows how the architectural discourse changes the meaning of a mathematical concept, determining it within its own discipline. The transition of the term topological deformability is set as an example of how architecture uses and improves its inherent interdisciplinary dimension, as well as an example of how the way we research in architecture could make a tangible social impact.The first part of this paper will focus on introducing and analyzing the concept of topological deformability and its transition from mathematics to architectural theory.In the second part, it will examine how, through different theoretical approaches, the term topological deformability influences the transformation of the thinking modality in architecture, and how it traces the narrow path through architectures’ knowledge toward the wider audience. Therefore, architecture’s dominant as an instrument of plural social reality will be emphasized. The research will show how the term topological deformability through architecture opened the way to changing the idea of otherness, leading to the essential acceptance of differences.

The disassociation between research and practice in architecture and urban design is a recognised issue, leading to an ongoing academic debate on the credibility of the field. Most authors agree that the irreducible nature of the practice, the complexity of the built environment itself, and its indirect and multidisciplinary shaping processes render the applicability of gained knowledge problematic, as researchers are inherently confronted with the dilemma of rigour vs. relevance. This paper explores the relevance of architectural research and constraints to the application of theoretical knowledge in practice in a particular case of urban interface. It discusses the benefits and limits of planning and design tools derived from the theoretically described causal relationship between the physical configuration of the public-private interface and its social effects on users of the adjacent public space. Through a conceptualization of the process, the article illustrates that the application of theoretical knowledge in urban design and planning can be significantly improved by considering the factors of scale and spatial context as well as the forming forces, values, and motivations of the actors involved. This theoretical dissection aims to clarify the contradiction between theoretical values and subsequent practice to help promote not universally good but, more essentially, adequate, sustainable, and equitable spaces.

In Italy, the Next Generation EU instrument has made it possible to launch what could be optimistically defined as a new season for public housing after at least three decades of decreasing financial support. The PINQuA (National Innovative Program for Housing Quality) was supported with 2.8 billion euros, prompting a race among eligible public bodies to submit a proposal. Thanks to the funding, 159 projects of 271 presented were selected and are currently in the implementation phase. Quality and innovation, two concepts prominently featured in the programme’s title, encourage a sense of optimism. However, they also require critical examination to understand how the issues related to these concepts have been interpreted in terms of proposal development, evaluation, subsequent selection, and implementation. If we focus on aspects related to the culture of design, can we consider this programme an opportunity for architecture as a discipline? The research approach undertaken involved a direct participation in one of the projects: the urban regeneration of the Piazzale Visconti housing complex in Bergamo. The article reports the outcomes of a “reflection in action” [1] gained from a privileged observation point. Although referring to a single case, the research-by-design activity was an opportunity to get to the core of general issues, triggering a reflection on two complementary dimensions (1) the verification of project potential, expressed by the programme, (2) the understanding of the opportunities and certain problems intrinsic to the process.

Our research aimed to explore an inter-scalar field in which architectural design tools are intertwined with urban and territorial scales. The case is an enclave between different limits: a valley near the border with Austria, located on the edge of north of Veneto region with an ethnic-linguistic heritage of Germanic matrix, administratively migrated in 2017 to Friuli Venezia Giulia region. Due to this specific geographical identity, local communities and municipal administration needed to define new sustainable development models of their territory. This gave us the chance to fine-tune a design exploration process holding territorial plan, with its analytical and programmatic categories. Additionally, it allowed us to address prefigurations, of a dispositive and dimensional nature, that enable the definition of thematic aspects through urban and landscape tools in various locations. Through discussion tables with local communities, various stakeholders, and interdisciplinary experts, as well as cross-referencing data provided by the administration itself, we elaborated open web-based GIS tools. These tools allow for the interrogation of data at different levels. From this analytical phase, five main themes emerged: naturalistic system, tourism resources, local economies, territorial infrastructures, and historical identity heritage. These themes represent the inter-scalar field within which different design explorations at urban and landscape scales intend to interweave possible relationships with territorial and urban plans.

The co-creation design studio at the Department of Architecture, University of Cyprus, has been acting as a meeting place for students, educators, researchers, citizens, and external stakeholders since 2021, aiming to bridge gaps between architectural research, pedagogy, civil society, and local governance bodies through a transdisciplinary pedagogical framework. Acknowledging that many societal challenges are complex and multifaceted and cannot be adequately addressed by any single discipline or sector alone, the studio focuses on the co-production of knowledge with stakeholders outside of academia. This entails involving them from the outset of the project as well as co-designing design activities and proposals that are relevant to their needs and interests, ensuring a grounded process in real-world challenges. The studio’s pedagogical framework and methodology have been designed, implemented, and evaluated three times until now through participatory action research methodology, investigating the impact on the design result, the development of skills for the students, and their attitude towards their role as future professionals. The paper highlights the findings of these three years of research in a reflective way, suggesting future steps for improvement. Its long-term repetition will gradually build a knowledge base, aiming to revisit existing educational methods to respond to current and future challenges in an efficient and inclusive way.

Architectural research is defined as community practice and for communities. Architecture has always been constituted as an action of territorial settlement and domestication for the community liveability of places.This article, referring to the concepts of resilience and transformability of mountain systems, proposes to reflect on how rural mountain areas have always been able to adapt to changes thanks to the ability of communities to conceive common and shared design directions.The paper reflects on the conceptualization of commons and how they can be a model for resilient development in socially inclusive contexts. For this reason, an extensive review of historical palimpsests was conducted to understand how to start from the roots of the operating models.The article includes a field approach in Trentino’s valleys. The results are exploratory, as the process cannot be concluded and requires a long time for validation. From it, some working hypotheses are derived to be explored in further studies, such as reintroducing the commons into projects and societies in transformation.Architectural research in these contexts contributes to orienting knowledge through fundamental collaboration with other disciplines, which is helpful in defining regenerative processes consistent with specific environmental contexts.

The advent of mass tourism has endowed traditional villages with multiple identities as heritage sites, communities, and tourist attractions. As hosts, local villagers have begun to introspect and reevaluate the village environment that was once a part of their everyday landscape, giving rise to new spatial perceptions. As the primary stakeholders in village communities, indigenous inhabitants’ perceptions, preferences, and identifications with village spaces hold significant significance in preserving rural characteristics and sustaining village vitality. Using Hongkeng Village in southwest Fujian Province, China, as a case study, this study investigated local villagers’ perception of traditional village daily life space and activity paths from three dimensions: cultural cognition, emotional preference, and behavioral activities through observation, questionnaire surveys, and cognitive maps. The results show that villagers generally have high cognitive and low emotional perceptions of the exhibition space and the former staging space; they have high emotional perceptions of the neighborhood interaction space and the collective memory place; the activity path spreads from home to the surrounding area, and there are gender differences in the scope of activities. The study suggests that the development of the tourism industry has often overlooked historical context and the spirit of places. It emphasizes the need to rekindle the identity of “home” within the Tulou clusters of Hongkeng Village while maintaining a balanced distribution of public facilities and enriching residents’ leisure lives. This study is expected to provide insights for improving the living environment of tourism-oriented villages in China.

We are currently living in an age where the advancement of digital technologies has been rapidly progressing. Simultaneously, the digital avant-garde has been flourishing in the field of architecture for decades. The emergence of design thinking has been significant in this era, especially with the rise of parametric design thinking in contemporary discourse due to the advancements in digital technology. In this context, particular attention is given to parametric design thinking in this paper, with a specific focus on the current trend and the concept of “social performativity”. Moreover, the current tasks in architecture are more challenging in dealing with its relationship with social diversity and even conflicts. Hence, this contribution questions the positionality of architecture in multiple interactions and explores the state and impact of architecture in the digital age, considering both material and immaterial aspects. To investigate this, the study unfolds philosophical perspectives on the relationship between humans and space by expounding on several fundamental ideas from Taoism and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The study’s results contribute to a deeper comprehension of the relationship between humans and space, shedding light on both the potential and the complexities inherent in architecture within the realm of parametric design in the digital age.

In the session dedicated to Ways of Practice, the contributions explored the domains of professional activity in architecture today.

In a fast-changing society, training architects to be one step ahead of the challenges that policies and regulations impose on architectural design has become increasingly necessary. Schools of architecture began to address the training of architects of the future to face new challenges. However, the scenario appears more complex for all those architects already working in the professional field and requires training in specific topics. This situation requires the development of progressively more specialized courses, especially for postgraduates. In addition to knowledge, adequate skills must be acquired to face the challenges posed by the EU Green Deal and the new European Bauhaus. The key is to create a higher level of training system that frames specific issues and themes, with a learning curve that always keeps the role of architecture at its centre as the process and outcome of the transformation of places and as a tool for serving residents and the community. The essay intends to illustrate the specific experience of the Mountain-Able: Planning and Design for the Sustainable Development of Mountain Executive Master project, activated by the Polytechnic of Milan's Department of Architecture and Urban Studies. The themes and issues addressed by the suggested specialist training course will necessarily combine themes of scale, multidisciplinarity, fragility, and community, which require the development of a very specific training platform to ensure students engage in hands-on specialist learning open to embracing contributions from other disciplines.

The paper draws upon a pedagogical project that addressed the design of spaces for cohabitation, of new alliances between buildings and the natural environment, in the context of the contemporary city. First, it explores how the fantasy of the large-span, glazed, vegetated environment has shaped visionary projects, marking a shift of attention from the physical to the physiological and from the tangible to the intangible qualities of space which resonates with contemporary concerns on design for sustainability. Following the evolution of the glass house from a place of nature preservation to a vehicle of experimentation into new ways of inhabiting the city, it then examines the contemporary relevance of such a building type and how it has fostered new architectural narratives on the co-existence of people, buildings and plants. Second, the paper presents the methodology practiced in a postgraduate design studio at the AUIC School/Politecnico di Milano which aimed to raise awareness among students about the relational dimension of architecture and the reciprocal exchange between design and research. It discusses how, by revisiting the glass house figure, the studio output set out to generate new conceptual, aesthetic and design definitions of the architecture of the in-between, of spaces of transition between the natural and the manmade, inside and outside.

The participation of society in public spaces issues, though advocated for decades, experiences an increase in recent years. Citizen participation in Croatian spatial planning appears to be mostly declarative and formally takes place in the final stages of planning. On the contrary, the full benefits of integrative planning would be if participation of all sectors (civil, academic, economy and management structures) is continuous, especially important in the initial planning phase - forming the basic intentions.The selection of the best spatial solution by architectural and urban planning competitions has a long and fruitful tradition in European societies. It represents a good yet hermetic method in searching for the most appropriate, most innovative and overall best solution whose authors remain anonymous till the very end of the selection.The question is how to combine these two widely accepted and proven procedures into one, to acquire the best creative solution and raise awareness and involvement of the community?The article will present recent case studies of participation in open competitions in Poland, Germany, Norway, and Croatia. The contribution of this paper is the effort to present systematically the ways of participation and how they are linked to individual groups of stakeholders within the competition procedure. Through the comparative analysis, highlighting benefits and challenges, the combined procedure model is proposed and applied in the Croatian context.

The digital age presents both challenges and opportunities for the architectural profession. Architects must navigate the integration of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and digital design tools while adapting to the evolving scope of their practice. This paper investigates the balance between adoption and adaptation in architectural practice, exploring strategies for architects to effectively engage with the digital landscape while maintaining the integrity of their profession. The outcomes of fully embracing new technologies and methodologies are contrasted with the approach of modifying existing practices to accommodate digital advancements, considering the implications for the architectural profession.In addressing these issues, architectural education and research play crucial roles in preparing architects for the digital age by examining the relationship between design-based research, academic inquiry, and professional practice. This study investigates the advantages and challenges of digital technologies integration in design, decision-making, and resource allocation, as well as its influence on traditional professional boundaries and skillsets.Drawing from an analysis of the current scope of architectural services, this study aims to provide architects (practicing and teaching) with a comprehensive understanding of the opportunities and challenges that the digital age presents, enabling them to make well-informed decisions about the future of their practice.

The architectural profession can be seen as a developing and multidisciplinary career, which has evolved from the Vitruvian sole master to the need for specialisation and collaboration in multidisciplinary teams. As a regulated profession, postgraduate professional practice courses in Ireland and the United Kingdom (UK) play a critical role in the registration process for Architects. However, there is little research published on the pedagogy of these courses nor their suitability to the evolving demands on the multifaceted role required of Architects today. As a result, there is a need to reassess professional practice courses considering the competencies required in Architect’s diverse ways of practice. Over the past two decades, the number of Irish institutions offering Bachelor and Master of Architecture courses has increased significantly. Therefore, the demand for developing a new postgraduate course to meet the increased number of graduates is acknowledged. This presents an opportunity to address the research gap identified and to explore innovative approaches to curriculum design, delivery and assessment that can enhance learning while adapting to the changing societal, environmental, technological and professional challenges of architectural practice. In a desktop study, courses in Ireland and the UK were systematically examined to reveal fundamental similarities, with some significant variances. The study highlights the importance of reflective practice and multidisciplinary learning in preparation for the global challenges of the built environment. The complex nature of the architecture profession requires a diverse range of skill sets, knowledge and competencies as well as meta-competencies.

The contribution describes an urban design teaching activity developed in the last eight years (2016–2023) at the top School of Architecture in China. Several Design Studios “Urban morphology, architectural typology, contemporary settlement patterns” has been held at the School of Architecture, in Southeast University Nanjing, China.One of the main features of the teaching activity has been the strong connection with the practice activities developed within the Design Institute of the same University, such as the Urban Architectural Lab, founded in 2006 as part of the historic Architects & Engineers Co. Ltd. of the same university.The role of the Design Institutes is specific of the Chinese context, where those public structures are the legacy of the process of collectivization of the professions promoted during the Fifties. The strategic role of the Design Institutes located in the universities allows nowadays not only high quality in design productions, but also the opportunity for students to face real topics of great complexity and to improve their competencies: in design as well as in socio-economic management.The aim of the contribution is also quoting some urban regeneration projects developed in Nanjing historical urban tissues where the connection between Design Institute and Design Studios was fruitful and strong, from the choice of the topic and the surveys to the exams involving stakeholders within the final jury.

The paper describes the work of La Rivoluzione delle Seppie in Belmonte Calabro, where they have regenerated places and promoted new forms of community and social cohesion. The tested and implemented strategies aim to make these so-called marginal areas competitive and attractive within local and territorial systems and globally. The experimental nature of this practice is characterized by a methodology for designing and constructing placed-based interventions tailored to the territories and carried out through the involvement and protagonism of academics, students, institutions and local communities. A methodology that enhances the local skills implemented by knowledge of global stakeholders and it uses critical issues as opportunities to generate elements of innovation necessary to qualify the relaunch and the development of the area concerned. The action of La Rivoluzione delle Seppie started in Belmonte Calabro. The group acted as an agent of change and, above all, as a facilitator between the old and the new inhabitants. Not only Belmonte, but also BelMondo!

The scarcity of resources in a context of permanent crisis is not only an opportunity but also the only direction in which it makes sense to practice. In our view, there is a generation that has already accepted the challenge and is trying every day to develop antibodies to disillusionment. The Italian Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia invited these practitioners to recognize themselves as a “movement.” Titled Spaziale, it referred to an expanded notion of the discipline where the built artifact was not seen as an ultimate goal but as one of the possible tools for intervening in the fabric of relationships between people and places. Nine practices were invited to collaborate with nine advisors – from other fields of creativity – in nine Italian territories representative of conditions of fragility or transformation, with the support of as many local interlocutors. Each intervention represented a chapter in an incomplete agenda of urgent research themes for the national context and for architecture: open questions, traceable to the scenario of transition – not only ecological – that we are facing in these years.

False Mirror Office analyses its own architectural practice, exposing the connections between some of its recent projects, research activities and publications. The following text is based on the presentation led by Giovanni Glorialanza and Filippo Fanciotti (False Mirror Office).

Spatial and territorial complexity require new and multiple forms of representation. Photography becomes the privileged tool to reflect on contemporary shifting landscapes adopting a critical look at our society. Paesaggisensibili is an independent observatory on contemporary landscape, a space for research and experimentation for the elaboration of territorial narratives based on interdisciplinary and multi-actor engagement.