The coordination of the “Scientific Societies of the project”[1], which gathers almost a thousand professors from various disciplinary sectors, aims to emphasize the fundamental aspect of education in Architecture, Design, and Urban Planning, and university research in this field, namely the natural and indispensable centrality of the project in its multiple meanings.
In this regard, for several years there has been an ongoing dialogue and essential collaboration between the academic world and the governing institutions of the architecture profession to jointly address some central issues concerning the role of architecture—in education, research, and professional activity—in our country. The key issues to be addressed together can be summarized in two slogans:
1 Create the conditions for architecture to take place;
2 It is necessary to design in order to teach design
These are two strongly interconnected issues, because only a continuous exchange between education, research, and profession can truly make “Architecture desirable.” Therefore, it is crucial to understand what role we can have as architects and architect-teachers in the complex “cycle change” we are experiencing and what conditions are necessary for this role to be adequately fulfilled. Indeed, within the increased values of design practice in the processes of city construction, the role of the project is expanding from product prefiguration to decision support.This makes its reformulation appropriate, especially in addressing the issues raised by the crisis of collective representations and the very concept of “public” and “common good.”
Furthermore, it seems essential to emphasize that it is necessary to design in order to teach design.No one doubts that it seems senseless to allow a surgery professor to teach his subject without continuous and updated experience of ‘operating’, without distinctions between full-time and part-time. It is evident that if the continuous experience of the project is necessary, it cannot be otherwise for those who must contractually dedicate more effort to university activities. In fact, this distinction (full-time and part-time) “a paradoxical outcome of a democratic battle of the Sixties for the incompatibility between profession and teaching, which had as its main motivation the scandal of the Faculties of Medicine”[2] (Nicolini 2011) found in that field the ad hoc solution of intra moenia. While for other areas that equally require continuity in conducting applied research, to this day this solution is not provided, except in the penalizing formula of part-time, which effectively denies the continuous experience of design activity, the mandatory condition (defined by the scientific contents of the discipline itself) for teaching.
The same university research centers, departments, or structures they create, especially in light of what is provided by the latest university law, with the correct indication of a more intense relationship between research and education, must have the opportunity to conduct, transparently, in the fields of the disciplinary sectors present here, applied research, with the assignment, according to the various formulas provided or foreseeable, of assignments of different nature in the field of design.
On these topics, recent interpretations of the rules and legal provisions, both at the European and national level, require an agreed revision of the current framework and a shared understanding of its most correct legal interpretation. It is not, it should be emphasized, about carrying out a pure service activity or resource acquisition. It is about engaging in an important role, precisely in this phase of change, which requires the construction of a “future project” for our country.
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[1] ArTec-Scientific Association for the Development of Relations between Architecture and Technology; AU-Urban Academy; INU-National Institute of Urban Planning; ISTEA-Italian Society of Science, Technology and Engineering of Architecture; ProArch-National Association of Architectural Design Professors; SID-Italian Society of Design; SIRA-Italian Society for the Restoration of Architecture; SITdA-Italian Society of Architecture Technology; SIU-Italian Society of Urban Planners; UID – Italian Design Union.
[2] Renato Nicolini in “Doing and Teaching Architecture in Italy. Proceedings of the National Forum of Architectural Design Professors of Ischia 8.9. April 2011”p.112, CLEAN Naples 2011
