EDUCATION AND PROJECT

lvaro Siza Vieira

Sometimes there is confusion concerning what na architects training should be. The school curriculum itself already fosters the tendency towards diversification and specialization, but I believe that, on the contrary, what must be developed is above all the capacity to interrelate the disciplines that make up architecture. In the School I have been insisting for years on construction as the result of my experience both as student and as a professional. In many schools of which I have some knowledge, this situation of specialization, of a kind of divorce between the different aspects of production of architecture, led to a very strict separation: on the one hand there conceptual training, which was very abstract and based on exercises of design and composition, free from constructional or functional problems, as if supposedly to free the imagination, with all the dangers that there are concerning the imagination. On the other hand, then comes a link with the material word of construction, of production, which is completely codified. This is the world of the materials catalogues and of the suffocating regulations. Later, the two apprenticeships never work together; there is a distance between the project and the realization, that is, the material part. This is thoroughly channeled by the rules that it becomes quite normal to see an architect produce the project and others continue it. Everything is split and the result is only too obvious. The purpose of this is to seek liberation from problems of construction, of technique, when is really necessary is to find the way to involve the architect in a process that encompasses highly complex technical activities.