Last year I saw Beatriz Colomina present Radical Pedagogies, a research project that she led together with PhD students at Princeton University School of Architecture. Radical Pedagogies focuses on schools and programs from around the world that emerged postwar, strongly tied to social changes of the time. The material produced over three years of seminars, interviews and archive digging shows a compelling story of the ways that "architectural pedagogy" have impacted today's architecture education.
Invited to the Monditalia section of the Venice Biennale, Radical Pedagogies paints a global picture while focusing on some of the strong Italian influences of these new movements—such as Lina Bo Bardi in Brazil and Aldo Rossi in Argentina—in an interactive exhibit that includes augmented reality content by dpr-barcelona.
The exhibition was awarded a Special Mention, cited by the jury for "highlight[ing] the emergence of new poles of architectural thinking in the current world and mak[ing] these accessible as a living archive. The research project is part of an ongoing global project that shows that knowledge is produced and develops in a networked way beyond national borders and national identities."
We wanted to show our readers more about this project, but focusing on the physical armature of the exhibit, a dimension that is often ignored from a technical point of view. That's why we asked Chilean practice Amunátegui Valdés Architects to share the architectural details of the Radical Pedagogies: Action - Reaction - Interaction exhibit and construction. Read more after the break.
From Amunátegui Valdés Architects. Radical Pedagogies: Action - Reaction - Interaction displays at the 14th Venice Biennale the ongoing research carried out by a group of scholars and PhD students from Princeton University and elsewhere.
The content of this exhibition has been organized along a 21m wall installed in one of the rooms of the Corderie as part of the Monditalia section of the Biennale. The wall has been devised as a building as much as a piece of furniture, thus mirroring the wide range of spatial configurations which served as backdrop to most such pedagogical endeavors.
The upper section of the wall displays an atlas of pedagogical experiments undertaken from 1940 to 1980 above all in Europe, Asia and the Americas. The middle section of the wall offers a closer reading of the cases through a number of take-away texts, each of them corresponding to a case in the atlas. Other relevant publications have been displayed below the texts so that the visitor can relate the pedagogical experiments with the most prominent debates on the subject at the time. The third, lower section is comprised of a timeline that guides the viewer through the broader discourses and events produced throughout the middle and latter decades of the twentieth century. In this way visitors can situate themselves - as much as the case studies before them - in the wider cultural context of the period.
On top of the wall, a digital cartography has been produced to show the visitor the trajectories undertaken by most of the actors involved in architectural pedagogical experiments, thus evidencing the multiplicity of cultural transferences embodied in such endeavors, and in the people and institutions who led them.
