Heritage as a pedagogical resource and platform for exploration in architectural design education: Fid-Bau Portal

Heritage as a pedagogical resource and platform for exploration in architectural design education

Lapadula, María Inés / Quiroga, Carolina

Architectural education has always represented a complex epistemological issue. On the one hand, the discipline brings together different types of social, cultural and technical knowledge, necessarily linked to its context, and thus with established, structured guidelines, rules and precepts, although these are adaptable. On the other hand, all this supply of knowledge is organised through a creative action, design, which at the same time involves open logics which are not always previously established, innovative aspects and flexible guidelines, often leading to new configurations or unconventional, unknown orders.

To design includes a process of synthesis deriving from applied knowledge, ie, knowledge put into action; thus, whilst learning, it is important for each of the specific skills and logics involved to be articulated and in balance, so that significant solutions, adapted to their context, can be produced, rather than mere technicism or abstractions divorced from concrete reality.

Heritage offers a pedagogical resource for dealing with several areas of content typical of architectural design courses, highlighting important aspects such as the consideration of cultural and symbolic dimensions, training in the built environment and its technical, constructional, programmatic and methodological offshoots, and the need to think creatively about the enhancement of habitat and its future possibilities.