Construction Thematic Subnetwork
2003
Call for the Second EAAE-ENHSA Workshop
Construction Teaching Methods:
The Exercise(s) in the Teaching of Construction
Les Grands Ateliers de L' Isle d'Abeau, France, 15-17 May 2003
In the framework of the construction course in a school of architecture, teachers design exercises. What is a construction exercise? Is it an application of the course, a specific illustration, or on-site practice? Is the construction exercise closer to the physics exercise or closer to an architectural design exercise? Most teachers invent original exercises, which are adapted to the pedagogy of architecture. Some exercises call on science, on the theory of elasticity, others require imagination, invention, or experiments….Whatever the type of exercise, its narration can constitute useful material and tool for debate, exchange and study towards enriching the knowledge and experience of a construction teacher.
For this Second Workshop will focus exclusively on these exercises. Therefore, participants are invited to present some of these exercises, which are representative of the problems raised by the pedagogy of architecture and more specifically the pedagogy of construction. Four criteria could form the basis for the evaluation of these exercises: a criterion linked to knowledge itself (‘explain'), a criterion linked to pedagogy (‘transmit'), a criterion linked to capitalization (‘memorise') and a criterion linked to the operational potential of the exercise (‘acting').
The Workshop will develop around four sessions. Each one of the four sessions will deal with one of the above qualities of an exercise on construction. More specifically the four sessions are articulated as follows:
‘Explain': The exercise (or the series of exercises) aims at exposing, exploring and explaining a specific problem, at ‘staging' by means of various tricks so as to make the initial problem intelligible. This may involve a simple calculation, like that of a beam for a project, or the design of an original construction principle. Whatever the case, the exercise generally shows and demonstrates something.
-
‘Transmit': This function is often difficult to represent, and teachers tend to consider it natural. Yet, any exercise includes a measure of efficacy or even of considerable educational productivity. This is especially true of architecture in which students are strongly conditioned, so to speak, by imagination. One can imagine a thousand ways of inscribing construction laws or rules within the architectural design process.
-
‘Memorise': A construction exercise often appears like a happening, which raises the problem of its memorisation. It leaves no trace but a recollection. A lot of teachers give handouts and bibliographies with their course. But the exercise itself may be designed as a memorisation tool. It is a kind of writing. The problem raised here is how construction exercises generate their own traces.
-
‘Act': In the teaching of architecture, construction is not a science in itself, universal, abstract and positive. It is by definition ‘applied'. The question raised is precisely to know how to apply certain rules or phenomena and then to do the modeling. How can such phenomena, represented in this way, generate a project? What specific energy can the exercise develop in the process of putting it to work?
Participants are invited to contribute to the debates and take the opportunity to voice their own views deriving from their own experiences. Following the structure of the First Workshop, the Second Workshop is not a paper presentation but it is primarily based on debate. Keynote speakers, who are specialists in the area of construction teaching, alongside participants' selected innovative paradigms as well as posters will be the stimuli for the debates.
