The importance of drawing in the architecture project and its teaching

We start designing working and thinking with our hands. With them, we can shape an external object first and think and develop the architectural project through it. When designing, our hands act as tools that move between the worlds of matter and thought, making it possible to work with our ideas, clarifying them and fixing them up into something buildable. From the drawing, the performing of sketches, models, collages ... we can travel that road made by ideas to enter a world of physical reality through a process in which the actions of thinking, drawing and building continually succeed each other. This article tries to explore the role of our hands when designing in order to learn more about the process of creating the architectural project and the way it is generated, to finally speak about issues interesting for us concerning the way they are taught. Every project comes into existence through a handmade object. Hands move through the paper whiteness, the pencil start fixing strokes on its surface, sometimes fast, sometimes slowly, and sometimes, with different intensities. Shapes yet to be defined, barely sketched, features of forms still emerging... constitute, at the beginning of the project, a series of acts which commence it and will develop in time. During this process, drawing assumes a prominent role, not only as an instrument allowing the representation of the projectual idea itself, making it visible and defining its materialization and construction, but also as an element that generates thinking, as it is through drawing that we can work and think on the idea that originates it. Drawing, writing, building models..., in short, working with your hands consciously, leads us to develop a thinking process in which gaze and hands work together. It would be necessary to claim that action for the teaching of architectural projects as a method of doing and thinking. During the project development, it would be necessary for students to learn how to work with instruments, tools... that resist the achievement of mere projections or mechanical representations of those things before their eyes, to get into the being of things, their presence or their being present. In this respect, and in the field of the architectural project teaching, it is essential to highlight the importance of drawing due to its effectiveness to transmit and express a form of thinking. As Martin Heidegger suggests, our hands are organs for our thinking. When they are not working in order to know or learn, they are thinking. Drawing, building models, sketching... is a matter of “doing” that turns into a way of “thinking” where hands and ideas are joined together as long as the project is carried out. Therefore, the value of drawing lies in its function as a tool for reflection. Designing means to think in a graphic way, to materialise our ideas through our hands to work with them, think about them and, to materialize them once more. Sketches, models, collages, schemes... suitable for every step during the project development allow us to check the different design options, test and error trials. These act as critical instruments that inform about the validity of every decision taken. This is why the project cannot emerge from the mere application of a static, definitely established knowledge, but from a dialectical process between thought and action, gaze and hands. Therefore, we could say that the drawing is an instrument of reflection that allows us to focus our thoughts, to define a support to contain, shape and define them, and to communicate the essence of our ideas, specifying and fixing them to turn them into something buildable. Hence the importance in the development of any project and in his teaching not only of those drawings that shape that graphic documentation enabling the building of architecture in every aspect, but also of the early drawings, sketches, schematic drafts, ideograms and series of images that try to study its context... and already contain the first projectual idea, clear and definitive, anticipating the formalisation of the project and sensing some material, building and structural conditions.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

New challenges for the teaching of architecture

The implementation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) opens us to a new scenario marked by a training model increasingly complex and extensive in time that differs considerably from that which has been done so far and that makes it necessary to think again University. In this context, it is necessary to review the teaching model of the current Schools of Architecture: defining new strategies and reflection mechanisms according to the expectations of the degree and the postgraduate in our country and reconsidering the ways of teaching and learning, taking into account not only the what you want to teach, but also to how you are going to teach in order to move from the traditional model of transmission of knowledge from teacher to student, to a model based on the development of competences in the student, in which knowledge stops be stable and scarce to demand its expansion and update constantly throughout life and where the educational institution loses its exclusivity when transmitting knowledge and information. All this makes it necessary for the student to reach the capacity to acquire all those knowledge, skills and attitudes that will require throughout his life in his academic or professional training becoming the true protagonist of his own training. For this, it is necessary to think of a teaching of architecture that defines more flexible learning pathways that support ongoing training. A teaching oriented more to show an attitude towards the project, to encourage, stimulate and involve students in their own learning process helping them to develop their capacity to learn to learn. In short, a teaching is demanded in which the training on information predominates with the aim of creating learning situations that facilitate a subsequent continuous training and that allow a more critical and deep intellectual development that enables to generate knowledge.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Reflections about the creative process of the architectural project and its teaching

This paper aims to reflect on the importance of the eye in the creative process of architectural projects. All creation is based on a watchful eye, which acts as an instrument of knowledge and reflection; an active and creative eye that contains a thought. But creation is also in the hands of those who put these thoughts down onto paper and materialise them. In this sense, teaching architectural design should fundamentally consider educating the eye, so that students develop a perceptual ability allowing them to address all kinds of architectural projects creatively. Educating the eye therefore becomes the main goal of teaching architectural design. Learning how to see is essential. This learning calls on the eye as an instrument of knowledge and analysis of the reality to be transformed. An eye with a purpose not just of looking at something for the sake of it, but of seeing it, of seeing it to learn and to become aware of the world surrounding us, whether physically, emotionally or intellectually. An eye that focusses on the reality around them in a conscious and attentive way in order to provide the information to work with when it comes to designing, both from an objective and rational outside world and an intimate and personal world. A creative eye, capable of creating and transforming reality. An eye that involves the action of thinking. But above all, an eye that acts in coordination with hands that work as instruments of knowledge, that move between the world of matter and thought, and that allow this world of ideas to be unearthed, spilling thoughts onto paper, specifying them and fixing them until turning them into something that can be built. In the teaching of architectural design, it would be necessary to foster this action as a way of doing and thinking.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Methodological advances in the analysis, assessment and intervention of industrial landscapes

We are currently witnessing a gradual extension of the concept of heritage. This idea has evolved to encompass landscapes and is even reaching into an area which, until recently, had not received sufficient attention: industrial heritage. This new notion of what constitutes heritage is particularly interesting from a cultural perspective, with the appearance of the term “cultural landscape” which covers landscapes produced by industrial decay, among other things. This extended concept of heritage, which is gradually growing both quantitatively and qualitatively, has not only added extra complexity to the limits of what is considered heritage, but is also bringing an evolution in the methodological parameters used for analysis, protection and action, from a 19th-Century modern scientific perspective towards a more epistemological, ideological, political, cultural and technical approach. The object of this paper is to study and analyze the theoretical principles and developments made at international level in relation to environmental research, from the second half of the 20th century to the present day. More specifically, we will focus on the methodologies which seek to overcome the obsolescent tools and methods used in landscape analysis. For this purpose, we will pay particular attention to the methodologies that go beyond considering landscapes as mere visual phenomena, to treat them as an intimate and complex relationship between people and a place. The British methodology Landscape Character Assessment will have a special place in this study. However, this interest in LCA does not mean that we will be ignoring other major methodological contributions. This method review will ultimately enable us to define the basic supporting pillars for the development of a specific methodology to be used in the analysis and intervention of industrial landscapes produced by industrial decay.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Innovation and training in the teaching of architectural projects

The architecture project is first of all an autonomous fact linked to a creative process. Thought and creation are intimately related in every project process and, although architecture materializes through constructive and material systems, it is only possible to conceive it through the construction of thought. For this it is necessary, on the one hand, the knowledge of guidelines, rules and objectivable principles of the architectural discipline but, on the other hand, it needs, like any creative act, to develop in a dialectical relationship with another type of material that is not specific to this discipline and is part of a personal world, the result of our experience in the world and in which the architecture project most often finds its base or owes all its wealth. It is in this way, that the architecture project acquires values and meanings that are above the objectifiable and the tangible, thus reaching a double dimension: on the one hand, the rational and objective linked to a series of conventional knowledge, regulated and specific to the architectural discipline that evokes that character of the most technical project; and, on the other hand, the subjective and personal, common in every creative act, related to an intimate world that refers to that more subjective, unstable and unpredictable character of it. Both factors acquire the same and decisive importance in the development of the project. Likewise, they constitute two aspects equally essential for their understanding. However, it is the most objective, rational and easily transmissible aspects that become, in most of the times, in the center of attention during the development of the project and in its teaching or in the object of study of research works, forgetting or leaving aside that highly subjective component that it possesses.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Non-linear models for a gypsum kiln. A comparative analysis

INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF AUTOMATIC CONTROL. WORLD CONGRESS (15.2002.BARCELONA)This paper presents several non-linear models adjusted in order to capture the dynamics of a gypsum kiln. The behavior of this kind of processes is affected by nonlinear effects caused by the existence of disturbances and the coupling among some variables. The use of second order Volterra and Hammerstein models as appropriate solutions to describe the process dynamics is analyzed. A thorough study of the best model order and structure is performed. Coefficients that best fit real data are also selected. This work aims to obtain a good non-linear model in order to implement a non-linear predictive controller, able to improve the performances of those linear controllers already tested on the plant.Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología (CICYT) 1FD97-083