Description
Engaging the example of the “Re-writing Hi-story” project, a small-scale design studio for a lecture-based history course at McGill University, this paper discusses a different way of dealing with the teaching of his¬tory in Schools of Architecture. Challenging the common pedagogical assumption that studio and history courses are usually unrelated, the project focused in activating the relationship between the way the students perceive and contemplate history and the way they deal with the contemporary architectural reality. The core intention was to explore a way of making the historical background more relevant to the actual architectural questions that they are interested in, as they design, experience or think about architecture nowadays.Following from Flusser’s understanding that man’s historical consciousness emerged with the invention of writing, the students were asked to write a short essay after every week’s lecture, foregrounding connections between the lec¬tures’ historical material and contemporary architectural matters. After the production of seven different essays and individual weekly desk-crits for discussion and feedback on their writings, they were asked to choose one of the essays, and think of a way to communicate its message, always in writing, to the broader audience of the School or the people of Montreal. They had to think where and how to write this message, in a way that was appropriate for the content of the message itself, in terms of scale, medium, and location. They had to design that very writing.
Partaking from the project’s final results, the student’s observations and faced difficulties during the process, this paper contemplates on how encouraging them to understand history as a frame¬work of orientation that can give guidelines and set precedents for practice nowadays, helps students to develop a language of their own and tell their ‘stories’, as they act architecturally and realize where they stand historically.
| Period | 2013 |
|---|---|
| Event title | ATHENS INSTITUTE FOR EDUCATION AND RESEARCH: 3rd Annual International Conference in Architec ture, |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Athens, GreeceShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |