From the education of the architect to the architecture of education: an essential dialogue

Abstract

INTRODUCTION. The present article is a review of the relationships between architecture and education, not from a perspective that insists only on the presence of the architecture and urban planning in the educational contemporary curricula, following the much imitated case of Finland, but from a point of view that considers the whole education changed by the spatial dimensions of culture. We start from the work carried out by the research group working into education on architecture during the last 40 years, thanks to developmental interdisciplinary research projects, international congresses and international  journals.  METHOD. Addressing the relationship between architecture and education methodological approaches requires a combination of different disciplines, such as methods from: Cognitive Anthropology, Ethnomethodology, Cognitive Sciences, History of Art, etc. In the present article we describe some examples of this interdisciplinary crossroads. RESULTS. The article shows that the relationship between architecture and education provides solutions to the interrelations between disciplines described above that have been isolated until now. DISCUSSION. The findings of this brief revision aim to highlight the fundamental hypothesis of the article, that is to say that without these deep changes in education, with the aim to strengthen the capacity of the  societies to defend their cultures with good architecture and urban design able to support physical, mental and social health of their inhabitants. In this way, urban planning and education are the two faces of the same coin: when one of them disappear the currency loses its full value.