Educational paths and research topics: the contribution of architectural technology

Abstract

In October 1969, with the establishment in the Faculties of Architecture of the teaching of Architectural Technology, the technical notionism expressed by the “constructive elements” was challenged by the indeterminacy dictated by the téchne in its exploratory capacity and the “knowing why” that precedes the “knowing how”. Among the various disciplines, Architectural Technology expressed a critical approach to habitual ways of living, prefiguring for the future a technique capable of linking the objective of concrete technological possibilities with the subjective, constituted by the quality of life. The transformation of the teaching system was implemented starting from the criticism of a design concept that looked at the technical- constructive components predominantly as a restitution of the completeness of the project in the construction materials and executive components alone. With Architectural Technology, the environmental dimension emerged in the teaching of Architecture, in which the new disciplinary field offered the basis for thinking about ideas and methods that, starting from ecology, inserted new values for the project according to a systemic approach, capable of looking at the construction of the habitat through complex processes and experimental architectures.
The current disciplinary frameworks are moving towards a revision of technicist approaches that induce the development of deep skills but lose the critical sense of technique and its ethical, environmental and socioeconomic interactions. In the new ministerial title of “Technological and Environmental Design of Architecture”, the discipline expresses the drive towards a way of thinking that succeeds in managing the choices and uses of technology, through the development of supply chains centred on the learning of students and not on the delivery of content, encouraging the aptitude for solving complex problems according to the dual capacity of contextualisation and abstraction.