Architecture and social transformation. The emerging discourses in the training of architects in Latin American schools

Abstract

This research tries to verify how the discourses of social transformation are applied in training practices in architecture schools in Latin America. From the analysis of teaching experiences, published in specialized media, ideological positions are analyzed in relation to teaching methodologies and contexts.
For this, a significant number of teaching practices are compiled and classified through academic publications. The objective of this classification is to detect and analyze the underlying discourses and, in this sense, to make a diagnosis of how curricular learning in the teaching of architecture in the region is positioned and how it propels social change. The architectural projects workshop is taken as the main reference but without ruling out practices in other subjects of architectural training.
On a theoretical basis in which we define the components of learning –context, subjects, spaces, object– we identify the predominant discourses, we establish relationships between them and their geographically localizated belonging. Indeed, the discipline is concerned with social innovation that is verified through: development of creativity and technological implementation; the responsibility in the care and conservation of the environment with the sustainable use of resources; and the need for social mediation through the participation and cooperation of various agents in the processes of transformation of the habitable environment.
In the Latin American context of particular socio-economic, cultural and environmental characteristics, the aim is to establish an observatory of teaching practices with the purpose of finding out to what extent they adjust to reality and latent needs; how learning in the architecture career, in the schools of Latin American countries, develop skills for professional practice in the future, what knowledge, what tools and what skills are exercised to face research, design and social communication in the intercultural context of Latin America and for social innovation.
Once the criteria for the analysis of the 114 selected teaching experiences have been established, a series of diagrams have been made that represent the conceptual connections between them. After its analysis, the text synthesizes, through some examples, the key concepts applied in the active methodologies of the architecture teachings.
In the experimental processes, the results obtained and the social significance of these practices, the implementation of three underlying discourses in the general architects training has been fundamentally verified: creativity and innovation, environmental training and sustainability and learning in solidarity and interdisciplinarity. A fourth specific discourse has also been detected for the training of architects in Latin America that we have meant with the terms ‘other architectures’ to refer to a discourse of an alleged Latin American architecture of its own. These discourses are not mutually exclusive and are not presented in a pure state but with greater complexity and nuanced by the other analysis criteria.
From this study, emerging and current changes in architectural education in Latin America are observed. These are the openness, diversity and flexibility of tactics to restructure learning spaces, redefine learning subjects, reformulate methods and purposes, and redefine the object of training, aimed at meaningful learning for a professional practice oriented to service and social transformation.