THE ARCHITECTURE WORKSHOPS: ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE IN SEARCH OF QUALITY IN EDUCATION

The history of the Architecture workshops is revised, where these workshops are a collaboration experience among professors who manage the transversal nature of the architecture trade.

These workshops were conceived to facilitate the confluence of the contents of the different subjects that concern the architectural project, thus guaranteeing the optimization of the teaching resources and rationalizing the work of the students.

The proposed model is a work and exchange space that is attended simultaneously, not sequentially, by the professors of the different subjects: projects, construction, structures, urban planning, installations and composition.

The wide variety of content and skills to be acquired in the disciplines and the professional orientation of the degree required the teaching of the degree by a faculty with a long and qualified professional experience, mainly in the field of architectural projects and specific disciplines. This criterion has changed by the drift of the University towards a pure academic model compared to an academic one with proven professional experience, something that is still fundamental in professionalizing teaching.

In these decades there has been a slow loss of transversality in the training and professionalism of its teachers, who are now more academic, with an increase in the technical complexity of the profession that has played against creativity.

The project and the architectural creation have been permanently present as the flagship of teaching in architecture, but the fragmentation of the learning process and the specialization of the disciplines have blurred the transmission of the goal of the architect's profession: the project. The detection of this casuistry pushed the different subjects to request their students an independent specific architectural project to apply their teaching, but without coordination between them nor with the subject of architectural projects. It is true that the achievement of the architectural fact was made from different disciplines, but without the necessary transversality and uniqueness. All this caused an overload of the students' effort within an annual teaching structure.

The figure of the Architecture Workshop appears as a space for collaboration among teachers, as a teaching experience that seeks to recover the quality of teaching by intensifying transversality to a high degree. Because of the way the Spanish University model has been built, which is based on a strict vision of research that is difficult to transfer to the contributions of architecture, both in its propositive and creative aspects, it is very difficult to recover the teacher with proven professional experience.

These workshops are now incorporated in the new curricula of the School of Architecture: degree and master. Here the antecedents, the previous experiences that determined the assumption of this model, as well as the first results obtained are exposed and analysed.