Teaching through Design. Image as Operative History at the Porto School

Abstract

The Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto, as an institution, starts in 1979. To its works and the design of the new building for the School (1983-1996) presided the idea of maintaining and building upon two centuries of accumulated pedagogical experience in Architectural teaching, a purpose that will decisively condition the programmatic brief given to Álvaro Siza, and his response to it.From all the requirements, together with the careful selection of the architect and the client, we find a purpose to manage the explosive growth of the school guarding careful consideration of its teaching model. The brief and the design clearly show a strategy of resistance facing the instability of the postmodern condition, strengthening the disciplinary autonomy through the hegemonic centrality of the Design Studio space and its product as the main synthesis of knowledge in Architecture.It is our understanding that this strategy may also have to do with a desire to invest the building with the role of a permanent lesson in architecture, and by immersion, educating its inhabitants in a “particular way of doing and teaching architecture” [Távora, 1991], thus developing in them the capacity for simultaneous analysis and synthesis of architecture, a particular characteristic of the Porto School.