Stoà / 4

Esercizi - Anno II, 2/3, Estate 2022

 

Within the vast panorama offered by the study programmes of architectural design education, a fundamental role is played by exercises, pedagogical tools used to determine and consolidate specific training steps, defined within each teacher’s syllabus. During the complex temporal organization of the individual workshops, the exercises set the time by punctuating, step by step, the learning process and by contributing to the explication – sometimes slowly, sometimes very quickly – of the general objectives of the educational experience. While in most design studios the main outcome is the definition of a project that is clearly identified programmatically and dimensionally, from conception to the advanced stages, as well as unambiguously located in time and space, the journey towards that result is often determined by a planned sequence of exercises. Exercises are tools, expedients, pedagogical devices: both specific and less exhaustive, sometimes abstract and extra-disciplinary, through their making, composing and arranging themselves in a sequence that follows the tempo of the studio, they are instrumental in structuring the design methodology. Stoà 4 brings together a collection of essays, images and interviews that investigate the potentialities and criticalities of this methodological resource, between depth and extension, through a recognition of pedagogical practices and international experiences.

 

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STOÀ is an Italian magazine, undergoing a process of double-blind peer-review, which questions the methods and processes that determine the educational project for architecture. Journal of the area of architectural design (SC 08/DI) STOÀ tends to combine academic research and teaching practices in order to generate und critical reflection on schools, its protagonists and their methods favoring an intersection between knowledge and other disciplines in order to understand the structures and tools essential to the construction of the educational project. A four-monthly magazine that with its making will build an international network of themes and positions, trying to force the limits to understand contemporary issues on a case-by-case basis, grounding them in issues of discipline.