Architecture as initiatory Knowledge: Architecture as Language of peace

This paper has been written viewing the horizon of architecture and Design Studio Pedagogy from a European/Mediterranean perspective. It argues that any renewal of the way in which architecture is taught must take into account the global environmental hazard. The culture of sustainable development, concern for the cultural identities and respect for differences says that architecture can be elaborated and taught as a highly powerful language of peace. Over the last century in the Western world, the teaching of architecture has become increasingly technical, turning its back on its historical traditions and responding ever more to the instances of the capitalist economy and intense industrial development. In developing countries, which are currently experiencing a major demographic and economic boom, we see a frenzied attempt to imitate this aberrant Western model. Architecture is being taught in a fundamentally a-critical fashion, with a strong predilection for high tech solutions and virtual languages. This creates a tremendous conflict between the improvised “disciplines” imported from the West and the invaluable autochthonous building traditions, based on substantial cultures and age-old practices. Paradoxically, now that the “Western” world has reached a post-industrial phase, there is a self-indulgent return to a neo-academic stance, an “artistic” approach to teaching architecture, in which collective knowledge is less important than individual skills, resurrecting the myth of the individual “genius” and the personality cult. In this trend, the technical-scientific and artistic aspects of architecture have been detached from one another and undergone an abnormal development. We are losing our historical memory of the processes of conception and construction; every salient feature of architecture is mortified in a praxis which at best is coarse and at worst crass and pompous. In this reality, the Italian tradition of design pedagogy has a very important contribution to make in reinstating the complexity of the debate on architecture and its teaching. The Italian school of architecture can contribute to reinstating the proper complexity of the debate. It comes from a great historical and philosophical tradition, which combines the ancient legacy of the Academies with the modern one of the Polytechnics. In the 1960s, in the general “revolutionary” turmoil which affected the West, politics and philosophy made a great impact on colleges of architecture. International debate saw the proposal of many alternative teaching models. The extreme theoretical and methodological plurality which characterises the teaching of architectonic design in Italy today derives from this rich and complex history. Thus we offer a consideration involving several different points of view on current trends. In the conclusions, we return to the international scene and refer to the International Conference on Humane Habitat (ICHH) 2005 held in Mumbai, India. On that occasion a “Manifesto” was produced by professors of architecture from Asia, Africa and Europe, and read out as a sort of “oath” which could unite the teachers of architectonic design all over the world and be a first written pact in the direction of developing the teaching of architecture as a language of peace.