Heads' Meetings 2003
Introduction to the Topics
In the debates of the past Meeting of Heads it was commonly accepted that the perspective of the creation of the European Higher Architectural Education Area reveals four basic and strongly related thematic sections to which schools of architecture are invited to respond meaningfully. These thematic sections could be codified in four generic terms; Curriculum, Exchange/Mobility, Profession and Assessment which are effectively the four key topics of our next meeting.
Up till now these debates have been based on personal views and appreciations of the participating Heads or their representatives, giving to the Meetings the nature of a valuable exchange of experience. The Sixth Meeting of Heads proposes a more rigorous approach to this discussion. It will attempt to tackle the four key topics but this time with a new structure: the School representatives that volunteered at the Hania 2002 Meeting to be attached to four working groups -each group working exclusively on one of the four key topics- having undertaken to work on the preparation of the event, will open up the sessions of the Meeting by presenting the outcome of their preparation which is the processed and elaborated information as this is supported by the results of the inquiry to which you are all asked to contribute, and which we may all have received recently .
Despite their value, the elimination of spontaneous but not necessarily representative narrations of specific cases or personal views, will give way to a more systematic and reliable presentation of the state of the art of the way that schools of architecture in Europe consider the above four topics. The outcome is expected to be a consistent survey of the trends and dynamics which have been formed to date. This outcome alongside the debates that it will stimulate upon presentation at Hania, will hopefully indicate the potential or possible difficulties of approaches in the effort of schools to generate a broadly accepted European Higher Architectural Education Area.
The material that has been the source for structuring the preparatory work of the working groups and the present open-ended agenda is recorded in last year's proceedings of the Fifth Hania Meeting entitled: “Towards a Common European Higher Architectural Education Area', EAAE Transactions on Architectural Education, ISBN 2-93031-09-0, C. Spiridonidis – M. Voyatzaki (editors).
