The modular system as a learning tool

Abstract

Ecole des Beaux Arts, Ecole de Polytecnique, Ecole des Arts y Manufactures, Bauhaus..., each period of history has responded with a teaching model to the question of what to teach and how to educate architects, bearing in mind the demands that the culture and the society assigned to that figure. Fourteen years have passed already since the Architecture Course was founded in Universidad Técnica Federico Santa Maria, an opportunity that was used to design “from scratch” a first year course of Introduction to Architecture. At that time, they recognized the complex challenge of supplying the students with the necessary disciplinary tools and knowledge, while at the same time generating an atmosphere conducive to the development of creativity, the sine qua non of architectural work. For that purpose, a one-year course was developed based on a hybrid modular system, composed of two types of modules that address, alternating, “the established” and “the novel” in architecture.
The modular system of the first year Introduction to Architecture course has proven highly adaptable and updatable and able to interpolate the transformations experienced.