EAAE
EAAE 2025 Local Organizing Committee / Book of Abstracts Editors
Félix Solaguren-Beascoa de Corral, ETSAB Dean
Eulàlia Gómez-Escoda, ETSAB Deputy Director of International Relations
Carolina B. García-Estévez, ETSAB Deputy Director of Publications
Keynote speakers
Pedro Azara, João Luís Carrilho da Graça, Sara de Giles,
Blanca Lleó, Héctor Mendoza+Mara Partida, Irene Pérez,
Marta Peris+ José Toral, Anna Sala
Session chairs
Còssima Cornadó, Carolina B. García-Estévez,
Eulàlia Gómez-Escoda, Ignacio López Alonso
Technical support
Elisa Capellades, Marta Sogas, Lluís Carné, Víctor Recio
Research assistants
Francesc Arenas, Mireia Fuster
Graphic image and web design
Rosa Lladó
Scientific Committee
Roberto Cavallo, Delft University of Technology
Félix Solaguren-Beascoa de Corral, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Oya Atalay Franck, ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften
Mia Roth-Čerina, Sveučilište u Zagrebu
Dag Bousten, KU Leuven
Michela Barosio, Politecnico di Torino
Patrick Flynn, TU Dublin
Madeleine Maaskant, Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten
Claus Peder Pedersen, Arkitektskolen Aarhus
Massimo Santanicchia, Listaháskóli Íslands
Jörg Schröder, Leibniz Universität Hannover
Tadeja Zupančič, Univerza v Ljubljani
Jaime J. Ferrer Forés, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Pilar Garcia Almirall, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Carles Crosas, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Lluís Giménez, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Pedro Azara, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Publishers
Iniciativa Digital Politècnica
DL: B 15321-2025
ISBN paper: 979-13-87613-64-8
eISBN: 979-13-87613-63-1
DOI: 10.5821/ebook-9791387613631
European Association of Architectural Education
ISBN: 978-90-83127-15-6
This publication has been supported by Erasmus OS funds for internationalization at home.
OJS setup for EAAE Publishings within SOAP: Frank van der Hoeven
Issue adaptation for EAAE Publishings: Mia Roth-Čerina and Mar Muñoz Aparici
Published:
2025-09-03
Preface
-
In a world marked by uncertainty, instability, and sudden upheavals, architecture – especially architectural education – is compelled to lead the way in addressing the profound questions confronting our society and built environments. In this context, the mission of our network association, which fosters dialogue, innovation, and collaboration to advance the quality of architectural education across Europe and beyond, assumes paramount importance. The themes of this year’s European Association for Architectural Education Annual Conference, Transhistorical Pedagogies, invite us to...
-
The Barcelona School of Architecture approaches architecture not just an academic discipline – but as an ongoing dialogue with the world. Like many European architecture schools, ETSABUPC thrives on a profound and evolving relationship with the practice of architecture. Here, teaching is not a simple transfer of knowledge, but the dynamic fusion of thoughtful critique and hands-on experimentation that meets society’s ever-shifting demands.
-
As we navigate the complexities of contemporary architecture, four key themes emerge as guiding principles for a more conscious and responsive practice. Architecture as Synthesis challenges us to reconnect with fundamental architectural principles while adapting to an ever-evolving world. Learning from Archives explores how historical records shape our understanding of architecture, offering fresh interpretations of the discipline’s past, present, and future. No Demolish urges us to reconsider the environmental and social costs of construction, advocating for sustainable, regenerative...
About the conference
-
The annual conference in Barcelona marks the 50th anniversary of the EAAE coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the School of Architecture in Barcelona. This volume brings together the abstracts of contributions responding to the theme Transhistorical Pedagogies, and is copublished by the ETSAB and EAAE.
SESSION 1 Learning from archives
-
In a context where the preservation and transformation of modern architectural heritage demand interdisciplinary approaches, the role of archives gains renewed centrality as a critical and operative device mediating between memory and design. This article reflects on the Architecture, Urbanism and Design Archives of Lisbon School of Architecture, University of Lisbon – arch/ves – as a strategic infrastructure reshaping architectural education, research, and culture. Comprising over 86 archival collections...
-
Taking as its starting point the increasing importance of the role of digital curators within institutions holding architectural archives, the project aims to elaborate tools coming from intersectional theory and practice in order to produce an understanding of how women and black men are represented in the digital curation of architectural drawings in cultural institutions. More specifically, the project aims to apply concepts and tools coming from the theory of intersectionality in order to examine how...
-
The ARCHIVES – Archives of Architecture, Urbanism, and Design of the Lisbon School of Architecture, Universidade de Lisboa (FA-ULisboa) have existed since 2021, with the mission of preserving, organizing, studying, and disseminating documentary heritage related to Architecture, Urbanism, and Design, with a particular focus on the Portuguese context. Through modern archival practices, the ARCHIVES ensure the accessibility, conservation, and integration of this heritage into teaching, research, and outreach...
-
This paper presents a methodological inquiry into the creative use of archival materials in architectural education, focusing on their potential as both sources of inspiration and visually operative tools in design processes. Using a one-week student workshop titled Belt. Gate. Narrate., held in Cracow, Poland, as a case study, the paper explores how narrative design can serve as a framework for engaging with historical documents – particularly maps – to generate site-specific, time-sensitive architectural...
-
What did you look at when you developed a design? What did you go back again and again to inform your thinking and drive your designing (and designing your teaching)?
This paper considers the tacit and explicit role of archives generated and held both by institutions and individuals in the development of architectural and creative practice, and the shaping of the teaching programmes that support these trajectories.
Working within a school of architecture that has had autonomy over the...
-
More than two decades ago, critic and ETSAB professor Carles Martí Aris pointed out that the weakening of architec- tural thought and the shortcomings in architectural academic research were largely due to the uncritical adoption of extra-disciplinary frameworks. These approaches have led to a diminished understanding of the architectural project’s potential to become a rigorous and objective research sub- ject. This issue is particularly pronounced among architec- ture students, who are increasingly...
-
Starting from the academic year 2022/2023, Renzo Piano has been teaching a course at the AUIC School of the Politecnico di Milano, titled “Art of Making Buildings Laboratory”.1 This course offers students a design experience grounded in the knowledge of built works, promoting a methodological approach aimed at developing the synthesis capacity that historically characterizes the architect as both a builder and an intellectual.
The methodological and conceptual foundation of the course lies in the...
-
The history of the teaching of architectural drawing can be traced back to the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, where drawing played a key role in the architect’s toolkit. Over time, the Academy became a model for architectural education in Europe and, until the 20th century, freehand drawing was afforded special significance.
The present day is a period of digitization, of a fascina- tion with new means of graphical presentation, and it would appear that the role of freehand drawing is losing its...
SESSION 2 It’s time! Architecture as synthesis
-
The urgency of a reflection on the teaching of architecture and, more broadly, on the role of research in the spatial education of users and general public, is realized in the complexity of contemporary challenges. Global changes emerging with much more rapid and unpredictable times and ways than in the past make it necessary to widen the architectural debate in terms of both themes and audiences.
Disciplines dealing with space are now forced to face the uncertainty to which territories and...
-
In recent decades, the world has witnessed numerous disastrous events, including natural disasters such as tsunamis, droughts, heatwaves, forest fires, and earthquakes. Moreover, societies have faced significant challenges such as economic collapse, pandemics, social conflicts, poverty, the gradual depletion of global resources, the impacts of climate change, terrorism, and war. Amid this era of crises and disruptions, there is a growing need for resilient systems capable of coping with such...
-
The concept of Homo Ludens, introduced by Johan Huizinga (1938), identifies play as a fundamental element of culture and human interaction. Within this framework, play is not merely a leisure activity but a societal function that fosters connection, creativity, and social bonding. Huizinga emphasized that incorporating play into urban life nurtures the spirit of freedom, encouraging individuals to socialize in open and inclusive environments. However, the design of university campuses often overlooks the...
-
The skyline of many Chicagoan streets is being progressively disrupted by the appearance of a new generation of buildings whose shape, far from striving for an adequate composition and a balanced urban landscape, only aims to get the maximum number of square meters to other for sale or rent. The massive and occasionally peculiar silhouette of new building developments or extension of pre-existing premises is increasingly present in well-known neighborhoods such as Magnificent Mile or the Loop, where the...
-
The paper relates to the teaching experience of the final laboratory in Architecture, City, and Landscape at the School of Architecture in Cagliari, titled FORMA TERRAE, as an interdisciplinary moment and the construction of a cultural posture in architectural projects.
This teaching experience flows into the PRIN Research Project TEArch - Towards a Terrestrial Architecture, conducted with the Universities of Naples, Bari, and Catania, addressing the fragility of southern Italy territories and the...
-
Increased awareness about environmental implications of human activities has required architecture schools to revise their curriculum in a way to include methods and tools for reducing environmental impact of buildings. In 1955, referring to structural design, Pierluigi Nervi stated that architecture education should limit itself to “correctness”, equipping students with the ability to properly dimension structural elements. However, Nervi himself recognized that the ability to creatively conceive a...
-
In recent times, various theoretical and practical contributions have called for a closer synthesis between nature and artifice, or between architectural and urban design and the landscape, in response to the current climate crisis that cities must address. At the same time, landscape architecture curricula are becoming increasingly consolidated and autonomous from traditional architectural education programs across Europe. Within this context of tension between specialization and transdisciplinarity, the...
-
Computational design has reshaped architectural education over the past five decades, yet its current trajectory reveals a conceptual drift. Early experiments, from the spatial analytics of Warntz (1965) to Negroponte’s vision of the Architecture Machine (1970), treated computation as a means to model complexity and support human-environment interaction. These initiatives engaged systems thinking, anticipating today’s imperative for adaptive, ethical, and context-responsive design approaches (Bertalanffy...
-
This paper presents a pedagogical model based on over a decade of collaborative teaching experiences involving universities and non-academic entities, including governmental and non-governmental organizations. The initiative seeks to foster a sustained dialogue between academia and society through a dynamic integration of critical and experimental thinking, aimed at addressing the complex and evolving needs of contemporary contexts.
Grounded in the premise that the future must be informed by both a...
-
In an era of ecological precarity and disciplinary fragmentation, architectural education must renew its commitment to synthesis – not merely stylistic, but as an integration of environmental, social, and spatial knowledge. This paper presents a comparative pedagogical study of two educational contexts employing Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) as a design and learning tool: a monodisciplinary course with architecture students, and an interdisciplinary workshop including students from architecture,...
-
A participatory approach to planning and design is no longer only the activists’ way to produce space but is today recognised as appropriate methodology to work together towards a sustainable urban development by formal decision bodies on municipal, regional, national and international level. There is however an embedded conflict in this approach in relation to pedagogy. Visionary architecture and design investigation create inevitable expectations within the involved communities. Even if most students of...
-
This paper considers apparent ambiguity between the ambition for our students to be able to synthesise and integrate withing their creative work, and the increasing pressure within professional accreditation to identify and measure core skills, knowledge and abilities through the testing of discrete and often disconnected element of competence.
The paper considers how the demands for high levels of synthesis and integration between the parameters of design, technology, theory and professional...
-
In response to the significant transformation of knowledge, society, and culture brought about by digital capabilities, architects are increasingly focused on creating, preserving, and interpreting knowledge while utilizing computational methods to read user experiences. With the advancement of digital tools and data analytics platforms, we can effectively interpret and communicate complex data, analyze spatial relationships, reveal connections, and gain deeper insights into user experiences. By...
-
Mallorca is a landscape of contrasts, desires, and contradictions. This island harbors a hybrid architectural ecosystem, nourished by constant external inputs and internal dynamics rooted in the optimization of local resources. This makes it an exemplary setting for a tense contemporary context, where architecture and its teaching must rise to the challenge of responding to contingencies and extremes in constant dialectic.
This contribution to the congress presents a reflection on how to carry out...
-
Modernity teaches architecture a lesson in humility and makes it occupy an integral place in the hierarchy of global values, but nevertheless one of many important links in the chain of interdependencies affecting the condition of our world. This is not a degradation, but rather an opportunity to bring it back to reality and an order; to take a self-critical look in the mirror of its historical evolution (Heynen, 2024, 100005). Never before in history to such an extent has architecture had to confront its...
SESSION 3 No demolish
-
This paper presents a case study of a repurposed swimming pool to introduce the Carrier Bag Theory of Architecture – a framework advocating for the reuse of existing buildings rather than their demolition and reconstruction. Evolving from Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, this theory reimagines architecture not as a heroic act of creating from empty plots, but as a relational and collaborative process that flourishes through existing structures.
The focal case is a transformation...
-
Within the no-demolish approach, the proposal introduces a new design strategy based on a process of urban erosion for the areas in need of urban transformation. Observing in particular the vast areas born through the building boom of the 1960s, where the city has grown out of proportion, saturating green and common spaces, the proposed strategy becomes an alternative to total demolition, envisaging a process of progressive erosion which follows the characteristics of Benjaminian porosity.
The term...
-
Addressing the diffuse city from a perspective of ecological transition1 allows us to broaden the horizons of heritage adaptation to an interpretation of everyday architecture (2) as a resource.
The contribution investigates recycling projects (3) that enhance their resources out of the building’s borders, proposing a vision in which the building stock plays a key role. The classical approach to transition, assessed by technical parameters, is challenged to reflect on new life cycles that propose...
-
Contemporary times present us with challenges that we sometimes fail to predict. Some that we can consider extreme, such as climate events, military conflicts, and intense migratory flows; others that result from altering the behaviour of our societies, such as tourist pressure and digital nomadism, manifesting in the lack of affordable housing or refuge spaces, which should make us all consider different living strategies.
Through an innovative pedagogical experience at FA.ULisboa’s Summer...
-
Demolishing existing buildings poses significant environmental, economic, and socio-cultural challenges worldwide. In Germany, reforms to the building code in the 1990s replaced the requirement for a demolition permit with a simple notification procedure. This shift has made it easier to demolish non-protected buildings, conflicting with the European Green Deal’s goals for resource conservation and climate protection. While the preservation and continued use of existing buildings make a significant...
-
This paper promotes a value shift in architectural education – from tabula rasa design toward reimagining inherited spaces as resources for future transformation. Spa settlements are framed as living pedagogical contexts for anti-extractive, regenerative approaches to the built environment. The study is situated within the SPATTERN project, which advocates an educational shift placing existing spa settlements at the core of integrating spatial history, environmental systems, and socio-cultural...
-
One of the most relevant roles in architecture professional practice and, consequently, one of the most relevant issues to be taught in schools, is that of social leadership. In this will, almost duty, to guide society on the way to improving its quality of life and ensuring progress, architects have not always found the support of political and economic establishment and, occasionally, they have become developers of their own proposals. There are many buildings that have survived to the present day whose...
-
Santarém is a medium-sized city in Portugal where the bullring and the fair defines an emblematic urban space. However, the symbolic importance of this public space does not correspond today to a materialized and recognizable form. The gradual collapse of the activities in the Campo da Feira and the spatial vagueness of the space surrounding the arena building, along with the urban imprecision in defining the city’s limits, are emerging challenges that the city has faced since 1994, then began a process...
-
Renowned architect and educator Professor Wiktor Zin (1925–2007) promoted heritage and landscape preservation through his TV series With a Pen and Charcoal and by inspiring lectures that often referenced his hometown, Hrubieszów. His legacy inspired the project Local Development of Hrubieszów – from Participation to Implementation, which included the Hrubieszów Climate House (Hrubieszowski Dom z Klimatem) section, led by the CUT Faculty of Architecture. The project documented disappearing traditional...
-
Contemporary architectural education often prioritizes originality over continuity, even in adaptive reuse. This mindset reduces layered spaces into geometric abstractions – mere volumes awaiting intervention, rather than acknowledging them as lived spaces with their own identity, memory, and atmosphere. This paper challenges the tendency among students to view existing buildings as empty shells, advocating for a pedagogical approach rooted in sensitivity and slowness.
Drawing on Pérez de Arce’s...
-
The practice of architecture stands at the threshold of a major paradigm shift. The longstanding model – rooted in Enlightenment ideals that equated development and progress with new construction – is increasingly being questioned. In its place, alternative practices are emerging that promote new sensibilities, attitudes, and mindsets.
As Enlightenment ideals give way to new materialist perspectives, a once-marginalized vocabulary – centered on care, repair, and empathy – is regaining prominence in...
SESSION 4 Skills and crafts
-
Architecture as a discipline and drawing as it’s primary craft are often considered as a solution-providers, offering stable responses to spatial demands. These ‘architectural solutions’ are highly conditioned by the building industry’s quests for speed, financial efficiency and investor’s benefice. This common practice is resulting in simplifying the overall capacity of architectural creative thinking and doing. Can we use the unstable state of drawing as critical agency for asking questions instead of...
-
Education takes time. Studio-based learning recognises this and provides a pedagogical environment that can afford a slower, more immersive, deliberate experience.
This paper presents previously unpublished research from the Studio Properties research project. It explores how daily patterns, project cycles, varying intensities of the studio, and designing alongside others are time-based architectures that structure learning in the studio. However, the difficulty for educators is that such...
-
The PopUp Workshop is a prototyping space where students can experiment with projects and their implementation
on a one-to-one scale using real materials. The workshop promotes an interdisciplinary and experimental pedagogy in which learning by doing is central. This article presents four pedagogical approaches used in the PopUp Workshop:
* Verification and Modification. Students learn to verify and develop theoretical teachings through physical experimentation. They test the feasibility of... -
Working with physical models involves craft as a form of ongoing research – through gestures, through both physical and intellectual acts. Among the tools of architectural design, models most vividly reveal time as fundamental to architectural quality. The haptic and reflective process of model-making fosters a unique, irreplaceable form of spatial knowledge.
This paper examines the performative and heuristic dimensions of model-making in the design studios the authors lead at the University of...
-
To what scale can the architect’s design operate today? This paper presents the outcomes of recent teaching experiences carried out in intermediate cities in Catalonia, contexts where conceiving the city as a project is still a field of work for architects, and where it is essential to explore new ways of planning amidst an increasingly dynamic and complex context. These experiences stem from the final- year urban design studios of the architecture program at ETSAB, which focus on the development of...
-
This paper explores the possibilities, techniques and advantages of using the research walking method in architectural education. This modern visual method generates new knowledge based on researchers’ direct experiences and findings. Its use in architectural education is grounded in a rationale of progressive pedagogy, which fosters critical thinking and meaning-making. It’s also about teaching methods based on the multiple intelligence model and the importance of spatial skills in logical thinking, as...
-
The increasing requirements regarding the level of education of architecture students and their competences necessary for their future work are a constant challenge for academic teachers. Curricula are constantly being transformed to reconcile the tradition of architectural schools with the complexities of the present. This paper discusses examples of new topics for freehand drawing courses, taught to students of Landscape Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture Cracow University of Technology (CUT) in...
-
In contemporary architecture, design methodology is in tension between the rise of new digital tools and the persistence of the artisanal creative process. While computational resources offer immediacy, precision and unlimited formal exploration, the artisanal process, ensures cultural roots, conceptual depth, creative intuition and critical thinking.
A reflection on how to integrate both approaches without renouncing a committed and identitarian architecture is essential. The adoption of tools...
-
The paper investigates the role of traditional materials in defining local architectural identities and the potential for their integration into contemporary design and architectural education. The study is based on initiatives carried out at the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies and the School of Architecture Urban Planning Construction Engineering, and articulates along two main trajectories. The first involved an international design studio engaging foreign students in field-based learning...
-
Practical urban research and new spatial experiences in the form of short-term experiments, hands-on construction, informal atmosphere, and co-learning define the approach of architectural summer schools. These non-formal, design- build programs have evolved into a distinct pedagogy, often implemented by architecture, design, and art schools through institutional partnerships. Back in 2008, architects and educators J. Anderson and C. Priest launched the Live Projects program at the School of Architecture...
-
Traditional Japanese tatami, 6x3 feet rectangular mats featuring a compressed rice straw core covered with woven rush, have been highly regarded by European visitors from the 16th to the 20th centuries for their beauty and cleanliness. Initially, many Europeans found sitting or sleeping on tatami mats uncomfortable. However, owing to its biodegradable and vegan materials, an increasing number now choose tatami for practical reasons such as health benefits, space-saving in densely populated cities, and...
-
In an era overwhelmed by a culture driven towards standardisation and efficiency, DIY stands out as a cultural and political reaction. It is not only a construction method but also a social and educational device that places not only space, material, and time at the centre but also the human body and the community.
This essay explores the pedagogical and territorial value of self-construction as a shared design practice between architecture schools, students and inhabitants. This approach could...
-
A most effective way of learning is to intrinsically motivate students by challenging concrete tasks; this paper describes as a case study the seminar Concreteness, in which students work with concrete as a material. We deliberately chose this material as the central subject of our seven-year research project in the seminar Concreteness, part of the master’s programme at the School of Architecture at Eindhoven University of Technology. The use of concrete in post-war architecture has had a lasting impact...
