Lessico. STOÀ, Strumenti per l'insegnamento della progettazione architettonica

One of the dominant features of our time is the impoverishment of the lexical landscape, both due to the continuous process of technicalisation of the professional world, which grows increasingly distant from a humanistic approach, and due to the establishment of new forms of communication wherein the image – rather than the verb – has risen to take on the protagonist role. And yet it is precisely through words (their meaning and the cultural references associated with them) that one is able to demarcate a conceptual horizon. In architecture, this usually occurs on two levels – on the one hand, from an operative point of view in the making and constructing architectural arguments and on the other in the development and transmission of the tools through which architectural projects are constructed. In this sense, whenever a term ceases to exist in our linguistic repertoire, so too do the images associated with it cease to exist in our minds. In the context of architectural pedagogy, this void can represent a major obstacle. Indeed, the absence of a word makes it impossible to access the forms of knowledge associated with it, to grasp its conceptual dimensions in the development of the discipline and, why not, to recognize its relevance for thinking and conceptualizing the contemporary world. It is in this sense that the precise choice of the use words, even if dialectically and through contrasts, can determine the character or the conceptual and cultural bearing of a design course, while at the same time providing the necessary resources for the redefinition of the limits within which a given conceptualization of knowledge occurs. The aim of Stoà 8 [Lexicon] is to carry out a critical reflection on the words used in the teaching of architectural design today, to identify a conceptual vocabulary necessary to encompass, and possibly reinvent, the various subject areas of the discipline.