Alvaro Siza - pedagogy
by Casabella 770
These notes on the teaching of architecture are based on certain beliefs, certainly questionable, circumstantial and fragmentary arising from my experience as an architect and as a teacher, which he summarizes:
1. The architect is not a specialist. The vastness and variety of knowledge that the practice of the project now includes its rapid evolution and progressive complexity, no domain knowledge and so allow sufficient. Correlate-planning-is his domain, a place that the compromise does not mean conformity, navigation in the interweaving of the contradictions, the weight of the past and the weight of the doubts and alternative aspects of the future-that explain the lack of a Treaty of contemporary architecture. The architect works with experts. The ability to chain, use bridges between knowledge creation beyond their borders, as well as the precariousness of the invention, requires a specific learning and stimulating conditions. The problem of building a home is no longer distinguishable. Each unit of the project, its propagation determined, is mediating between interests general and individual-requires an overall and a detailed approximation, simultaneously, real or simulated, demands relations plan and project, each containing the other, not restrict it or break it, or prioritize, decreasing in either direction . In the society we live in the draft is unthinkable without dialogue, without conflict, and meeting, without a doubt and conviction, alternatively, in the conquest of simultaneity and freedom.
2. In general terms, the teaching of contemporary architecture does not connect with this condition, or because this is not real, or because it does not pay attention (and that's what I think). In my view, and jet, the teaching of architecture requires at least: real and simulated daily work, in interdisciplinarity. The parties can be teachers, in coordinated exercises constantly, or it may correspond to a correlation between different courses, for the moment very difficult to achieve. The acquisition of knowledge-knowledge is always provisional and insufficient demand, above all, learning the ability to query, the continuous opening and critically, instead of the syllabary or exemption or the Bible. The composition of the teaching staff must be organized in consonance with this, beyond issues of career and hierarchy (that or should not be limited). A school must avere i mezzi per alimentare questa vitalità e flessibilità. L'apprendimento -l'acquisizione della capacità di apprendere continuamente- continua a concentrarsi, a mio intendere, nel disegno -nell'imparare a vedere, a capire, a esprimere- e nella storia -nel senso di conquista della coscienza del presente in divenire.
L'apprendimento della costruzione -della capacità di costruire con altri- non è dissociabile dall'architettura, per cui non devono esistere discipline differenti, semmai convergenti, in costante riconoscimento che nessun atto creatore si dissocia dalla materialità del suo accadere. Nessuna idea di opposizione tra paesaggio -percezione e costruzione del territorio- e oggetto -frammento del territorio- trova posto nell'insegnamento architecture.
3. The architecture does not allow improvisation and does not accept the idea immediately and directly implemented. The architecture is a revelation of latent collective desire vaguely. This can not be taught, but you can learn to be desired.
because the architecture is a risk, and the risk to be impersonal and the desire for anonymity, from the fusion of subjectivity and objectivity. Ultimately, in progressive distancing from the ego. The architecture means compromise transformed into radical expression, ie, the ability to absorb the opposite and to overcome the contradiction. Learning this requires an education to search for the inside each one.
architecture, art collective, is the enemy of the arrogance and lack of ambition, dell'elogio dell'autocastrazione (in the name of the supposed limitations of the other), the simplification of the supposed names of mediocrity. The collective desire manifests itself in every stone and every pore and reveal is the only way of not being "elitist." The pursuit of the sublime is identified with the social role of the architect, because the desire of the sublime is not an invention of the architect. The architecture requires the perfection of detail until the dissolution of the detail.
The message of hope in the paths of the architecture was born in the renewed interest of artists per questa disciplina -Donald Judd o Heerich o Cabrita Reis, o altri meno conosciuti. Questo interesse deriva dall'autenticità che essi trovano nell'architettura. È curioso osservare il percorso inverso di tanti architetti -la pretenziosa ricerca del titolo di artista, o il suo imbarazzante rifiuto, sotto i più svariati pretesti, proprio invocando, male, le parole di grandi architetti, come Adolf Loos. L'Architettura è Arte o non è Architettura. Non è madre delle arti perché ad esse non da origine, essendo come quelle autonoma e avversa alla dispersione.
