Winter School “Design for Higher Education” 25 November 2016, Sergio Porta and Enzo Zecchi

Описание: Biography:
Sergio Porta, architect and PhD in Urban Planning, is Professor of Urban Design and Director of UDSU (Urban Design Studies Unit) in the Department of Architecture of the Univ. of Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK. His research is on Sustainable Urban Design, including masterplanning for adaptive urbanism, urban morphology and evolution, network analysis of urban spatial systems, and radical community-based construction/beauty generation after Christopher Alexander. He has published over forty papers on international peer-reviewed journals and two monographs. He sits on the editorial boards of several leading journals of urban science and design and has been invited speaker at various international seminars conferences including UN-Habitat in Geneva and Barcelona, University of Cambridge, UCL London and Venice Biennale.

Enzo Zecchi, fisico teorico, ideatore del metodo Lepida Scuola, coniuga il rigore della cultura scientifica con la ricchezza delle scienze umane per una pedagogia coerente con le sfide del 21° secolo. Ha svolto attività di ricerca presso l’Università di Parma, l’Universitè Scientifique et Medicale di Grenoble, il Centro Ricerche FIAT e il CEA (Commissariat a l’Energie Atomique) in Francia. E’ stato Supervisore nella SSIS dell’Emilia Romagna e docente di Sistemi presso l’Istituto Superiore “Blaise Pascal” di Reggio Emilia. Collabora con il servizio Marconi dell’USR di Bologna. E’ autore di numerose pubblicazioni.

“The timeless way of educating architects”
Christopher Alexander showed us that beauty can be investigated in nature, in things that are made and built, and in our collective and individual selves, in a way that leads us to understand and enhance wholeness. All of this he pursued on the basis of objective physical evidence. Also, Alexander showed that the unfolding geometry of beauty can be sought with practical means that demonstrate its connections with all of life. A new Master program in “Building Beauty: Experience of Ecologic Design and Construction Process” is now assembling at the University Suor Orsola Benincasa in Naples, Italy, with the mission of pursuing beauty through a new model of architectural education inspired by Alexander, with colleagues of the Center for Environmental Structure (CES), the organization Alexander established for his professional and educational work. In this speech we introduce the context of “radical” traditions of architectural education and culture from the 1960s and the current debate in the United Kingdom and the US; we then present the program’s general vision, that merges a truly holistic practice of building with nature and the community, with a research/evidence based approach to knowledge; finally we focus on pedagogic principles aimed to align with, and support, such vision; the proposed pedagogy covers both teaching and assessment, by introducing a constructionist approach implemented through an original Project-Based Learning model updated with latest fundamentals of Agile Project Management.