Contribution description:

What happens when we admit the students' experience in the design studio classroom? Anthropology has helped us in reconceptualizing the 'Alicante Model' for welcoming their affect for people and landscape beyond the reference models of dissident pedagogies that are born "by opposition".

Paper long abstract:

For years, the 'Alicante Model' for architectural design teaching was able to sustain a coherent confrontational narrative while the tension with respect to what was happening in the more prestigious schools or in the professional "out there" remained. It happened then that the stability of that world collapsed and other worlds came to the fore from other urgencies that expanded the scale and range of our problems. At that moment it was the epistemic and methodological contributions of critical studies and the social sciences that allowed us to approach the city as a much more dynamic and interdependent matter of interest than we architects had thought.

From the beginning of the educational experience in Alicante, we had sensed that only an intense concentration on the organisation of the dispensable, on that which is not subject to institutional surveillance, would be capable of producing better ruptures than those of a confrontational model. We are talking about the intangible contributions of sharing a paella on Fridays after class, of the off-programme choice of trips, including their affective design, of the design of festive collective practices, of the constant sharing of the courses, etc. These are undoubtedly minor but effective issues for questioning the normative accommodations that articulate the teaching programmes and the understanding of what the university is or can be. This allowed us to design practices to coexist in our difference without ambitions of convergence. However, this spirit was not adequately conceptualised in the Alicante Model: while we allowed our classrooms to be populated by students who, timidly at first, demanded the possibility of talking about the issues that mattered to them in the classroom, we did not know how to explain ourselves the transgression of their presence. Still, it is difficult for us to imagine what they will do as professional architects with it.

In this work we have tried to conceptualise the appearance of this strange knowledge in the design studio classroom, with the aim of knowing what to do with it, but from the certainty that it is important to understand how a territory in the 'near' periphery is used and produced. Also, with the wish that it will make emerge architects that keep their affections at work. At the time, the notion of student-actor allowed us to make the participation of teachers and students in the classroom more symmetrical. Now, the notion of uncommons can help us to deal with the incommensurability of the knowledge that students bring into the classroom. Our wish is that teaching practices do not serve to integrate these incommensurables into a predefined architectural 'whole', but that students make new 'parts' with which to share a living construction of architecture. We know admitting students affected experience in the classroom is an act of dissent that involves miseducating architects in their learning of the discipline and we have found useful the experience of social sciences in taking seriously the knowledge at work in the lives of urban actors, still two foreign languages for us.