Teaching through Design

The 2nd RMB Conference 2018 will be held in Coimbra, within the framework of the Colloquium ´Teaching through Design´ that is organised by the Department of Architecture and the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, since 2012. The RMB Conference is an activity of the European Erasmus Project “Reuse of Modernist Buildings – Design tools for sustainable transformations”, coordinated by Hochschule Ostwestfalen-Lippe (Detmold, Germany), with the University of Coimbra, the University of Antwerp, the Instituto Superior Técnico Lisboa, the Technical University of Istanbul and Docomomo. The conference will be organized in four sessions – tools, methods, interdisciplinarity, research – focusing on the fundaments and on the advanced issues of the design process related to the Reuse of Modernist Buildings (RMB). Architecture education is facing new challenges due to crises of the globalisation and climate change, that has strong impacts on the role of the architect today. The profession is changing and therefore different ways of training architects are demanded. This question is especially relevant for the renovation of those urban areas where modernist buildings from the second part of the 20th century are waiting for strategic interventions – to be repaired, to be renewed, to be reconstructed or to be demolished. The architect needs new tools because just drawing is not enough anymore to understand neither the building nor the people who live there. The methodologies are more complex because they have to integrate not only the technical and spatial dimension but also the social one. This inclusive approach demands not only for new tools but also needs the dialogue with other disciplines, promoting an effective interdisciplinarity. Considering these topics, the architecture classroom is becoming more lab than a workshop, where new tools and methods are researched and explored, developing hypotheses that are tested in the design studios.