The Academia of Practice

Abstract

As architects, our main contribution to the Academia, School´s of Architecture and its students would be concerned with managing the subtle relationship between teaching and practice as complementary activities that underpin the field of architectural knowledge. Indeed, the activities of the Academia and of Practice in architecture are moulded upon different interests and goals. What makes them complementary to one another is the way they use the act of teaching/learning as a tool of inquiry about design. Architectural experimentation in Practice and Architectural research in the Academia are not as independent or removed from each other as one may first believe. Both are rooted in the certainty of uncertainty. The formative years of an architect are focused on understanding the act of design as the tool for developing a design project. Students are trained for five years in a process of integrating specialized knowledge into the body of a single object, ultimately a building. The traineeship that stemmed from a Beaux Arts training prevalent in the 1900s, has changed over the last decades into a more specialized one, due to the growing number of technical courses that are offered as complementary subjects to the central design studio course common to almost all the schools of architecture in Europe. Studio formats and design instructors become central to define a new contemporary approach to teaching teaching in Architecture, facing the new global model of the Bologna Chart. What shall be the formation of the Design Studio Instructor? Academic or practitioner? What is the format of a Studio? Integrated knowledge or analytic approaches to design? Is the architect-professor of the future, a specialist?