ARTICLES

How is Architecture Education affected by Coronavirus?

15/05/2020

By BAM Team

COVID means that everything is going fast.

 

It means that many things have changed, and others are changing week after week. It also means that we must make decisions in the middle of a big change. It is compulsory for us to be, as never before, quick and lucid. Science fiction is here, it has gone ahead, and we have to react on the fly.


We must report back on our opinions and review with the glasses from the past, present and future, what we were taught in the classrooms, in the Schools of Architecture, and the Master’s programs. We should look with those dichroic glasses at the consensus concepts on the public spaces of the city, on housing typologies, on the necessary surfaces, on the challenges of architecture in the coming years.


If someone achieved to close the puzzle of the pending pieces (to have a better the world that we leave to our children and its sustainability) with the new challenges, it would be an epic “Match Point”.


And after that, we need to start questioning: how are we going to teach? We don’t have enough square meters in the teaching buildings to respond to sanitary recommendations. Education needs physical contact, especially for students. Among themselves and with the sensations of the learning space. The parallel life of the instagramer now seems to us to be a premonition of our daily permanence on the screen.


We are not talking about the old courses or online Master’s Programs with well-recorded lessons. We are talking that we have learned the differences between ZOOM and TEAMS really fast. Those differences that affect the number of people called on screen, the ability to share files, or draw on screens. Or the possibility of subdividing the classroom into ten small groups.


We are talking about imagining a future for that tool that nobody wanted to take advantage of, given the circumstances: Delocalized classroom and teachers interacting from different countries.


We are expecting the vaccine and the circumstances allow us to return to the halls, to the tumults and encounters between lessons and its smells. The accumulated knowledge learned and experienced should make us design better teaching systems and better graduate and master’s degrees in architecture.


Hurry up, hurry up…