A mosaic of rough pieces
First drafts for future Learning Teaching Training experiences
It’s been a tough year for every one and even for us here at Triplex Confinium. With mobilities postponed until better times, partner schools further debated on their objectives for their common first Learning Teaching activity; the Jimbolia summer school. Following the road map set during the First Transnational Meeting, partners sought to better define their methodology within the three main teaching components of O1: Critical Thinking, Exploration, Design Implementation. Here are the first drafts.
While visiting Jimbolia in March, before the onset of the national lockdown instituted in partner countries, partners were fascinated by an image discovered in the Futok workers colony. It is the base plinth of the parochial house adjacent to the Futok catholic Church. Both the church and its parochial house were built by the colonists working in the Bohm Brick factory, at the beginning of the XX-th century. As a manifestation of their craft, the builders used all the different types of materials that the factory produced, simple bricks, profiled bricks, smelted ones and even scraped materials. The image in question is built of two registers one on top of the other. Its base is made of scrapped materials, erroneous iterations and experiments resulted in the smelting process that could not be used otherwise. The top is made of finely profiled fricks in perfect order and shape. Both serve as building blocks of the same project. Both are indicative of not only a final product but of a process with all its flaws and imperfections. A metaphoric image for anything that has to go through experimentation and several iterations to reach a final ideal form. This is in fact what we, as partners in Triplex Confinium, have been doing throughout 2020 as well. By remodeling and reshaping our previous experiments, we have searched for the ideal building blocks of our mosaic curriculum of lectures and on site experiences.
The proposed methodologies, published here, were thus built on the ideas and extensive previous experiences in such training activities of each participating school. Many of these have already been highlighted in our previous blog posts. More will come as we get closer to our first summer school. Within this comparative framework, new concepts were gradually formulated as partners looked not only at their specific skills but at the gaps and mismatches existing between the schools operating in the euro-region. We would like to think that our work plan is complementary, bringing forward the best of what each partner has to offer at this point in time. Several questions remained in focus throughout our common research. What are the skills and competences that architecture students, with a keen interest in teritorial problems, should acquire through our common teaching experience? What are the tools that they should be able to employ in situations as those that will be simulated in the two learning teaching training activities? How will these skills further translate and have an impact on their overall performance as practitioners working in this very specific territorial setting? Can this learning experience have an impact not only on the involved students and teaching staff but also on the local communities and their stakeholders? A keen interest, that we shall not describe here, was shown in defining our common area of action. This is just as much an epistemic understanding of our mission as architects as is one dealing with the nature of our common ground- the territory itself.
To offer a glimpse on our current state of play and even tease our future lectures and immersive onsite experiences we decided to publish, as first drafts, some of our teaching proposals. These will be further developed into flesh out lectures that will be up and running on our website in its course dedicated sections.
As the situation of the pandemic will hopefully clarify itself at the beginning of 2021 we will begin the recruitment process for students willing to take part in our two summer schools. Please follow us and stay tuned for more news. Until then please consider reviewing some of the topics that are being developed as we speak.
text. Cristian Blidariu
Draft proposals for teaching methodologies
