Architecture without identity

Hi there!

Well, on this occasion I will talk about some changes that I would like to do to my study program. (Program that in this case is the career of Architecture) For this I will organize my ideas into 2 main points:

- The curriculum: 

Exists an idea that is shared for teachers and students inside the career. Which is the major doesn’t have a common idea or philosophy about architecture studies. The only thing that connects the classes is the academic program designed for the faculty, but in the same class, you could have an extremely different perspective of the subject. 

For example, exist a class that is called “Latin-American’s Architecture Critics” where you study and analyze the history of Latin America Architecture, but depending on which teachers you would have that you could learn more about “Prehispanic Architecture” or “Colonial Architecture”, but ¡is not only that! Also, you could have a teacher that says that the arrival of the Spanish Empire to America was the “best thing that could happen to us” or maybe your teacher says that “our most strong legacy is the Prehispanic culture”. So, I ask ¿What’s the academic identity of our career? I think that is extremely necessary to have a common philosophy, a common academic project.

-Teaching methods:

Well, this is another HUGE problem that the career has, and this is due to several reasons. But I think that exist two principal situations which produce problems in the way of how the teachers teach architecture. First, we still using methods invented 100 years ago!! We still use the tactics created in the first decades of the 20th century. Where the students learned in the practice, which is ok. But is a path that is designed to walk alone, we still thinking in the idea of creating the image of the individual architecture that do everything alone (like a kind of Le Corbusier) But in real life, you work with a team, and that skills are not wealthy developed in the career. They left to the student the challenge of creating a wealthy team in an environment so fragile as a creative design team. Also, the second problem is that our teachers are only architects, but they are not teachers. In the faculty is not required to have pedagogical studies, so exist teachers that are very intelligent, but they don’t have the knowledge about how to teach. 

Woah, that was a blog larger than others. And these problems are only the point of the iceberg! Hahaha. Well, I hope in the future the faculty change for good.