Pedro da Luz Pinto

Research Group: Cities and Territories

Supervisor(s): Paulo Tormenta Pinto

Summary

The curriculum harmonization of European courses, converging for a European Higher Education Area by the so called Bologna Process (1999-2010), relocated the debate on specificity of education in architecture, and its traditional methodology of learning by design, within the University environment. In Portugal, the architect’s basic training embraces a university level education and a one year professional internship, organized by the Architects Association. It requires a Master degree, acquired in a double cycle of three and two years of schooling, and which introduces the future architects to an increasingly diverse field of practices, and compromises research as an educational purpose. Schools reconcile research centers, associated or not to other areas of knowledge, developing graduate courses and research "projects", targeting additional funding and producing "academic" work, which would become the basis of individual and institutional assessment, pressing the university professionalization. In education, career teachers can be both designers, teachers and researchers, and the curricula’s are modeled, reducing the hours of teacher-student contact, for the benefit of a learning model based on student’s autonomous work. Altogether, the pressure for structural and conceptual transformation, the professionalization and the urgency of knowledge production and financing, provide a change of pedagogy and didactics of teaching. Deepening this background, this thesis approaches the structural, organizational and curricular developments, a group of Portuguese architectural schools, describing the changes raised by the Bologna Process and inquiring to what extent they present a change to the organization, the contents and the significance of traditional teaching of the architectural design.

Period: 2008 - 2016

Resources: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/12330