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By Alessandra Gabriele
On the importance of space education
The specific character of architecture, compared to the fine arts and plastic arts, is utility. Architecture defines the space with which our bodies interact, within which our lives unfold and our time flows.
Architecture is an operative art but also "a social art that stands in the landscape and in cities with no choice on the parts of its recipients" argues Franco Purini. An art that affects private life as much as collective life.
In the not-so-distant past, before the discipline of architecture was formalized as specialized knowledge, building making was practical knowledge linked to tradition and thus to community. "the anonymous houses were built with a natural feeling for place, materials and use and the result was a remarkably suitable comeliness." wrote Steen Eiler Rasmussen.
Today, in the society of specialized knowledge, the homes and spaces in which people live are devoid of quality, without their awareness of it. Citizens move around and experience unskilled urban spaces, and do so, more often than not, in a state of distraction.
Yet it is in domestic and urban space that we take our first steps, that we learn about the world and learn through our senses, experience: the quality of space does influence the formation of our being.
Yona Friedman wrote in “L’Architecture de survie” that: “The crisis of architecture (like all planning activities, whatever they are: economics, organization, coordination, etc.) is caused by the impossibility or, at least, the extreme difficulty of communication.”
As in all specialized sciences, however, which directly affect society, one of the problems of architecture lies in the difficulty of communication and the esotericism of knowledge.
What Friedman advocates is a reformulation of the discipline of architecture that places at the center of research not so much the artifact as the users and their housing needs.
Friedman starts, in fact, from the assumption that the crisis of contemporary architecture derives in large part from the extreme difficulty of communication between architect and inhabitant. It seems necessary to reflect on the sharing of architectural culture, to work on the communication and mediation of content and issues pertaining to the world of architecture in order to overcome the gap between specialized knowledge and common knowledge about the space and the city. Bridging this gap means promoting programs of education about the built space, as early as school age, connecting different knowledge and different professions. School-age architectural awareness and education is not the business of educators and teachers alone, but must be able to count on the involvement of state and local governments, universities, professional bodies, schools, private foundations and museum institutions.
Unlike other spheres of culture-think of music or the figurative arts-architecture does not stimulate a desire for knowledge of the majority of the population, nor does it find a place in school teaching, nor in public and political debate. An incisive effort is needed, on the part of professional bodies and state institutions, to democratize access to architectural and spatial knowledge.
At a historical moment such as the present, true regenerative action must not only contemplate the built heritage but act on the common consciences and thinking of young citizens:it is necessary to induce the emergence of a collective architectural culture and widespread spatial awareness, already in compulsory schooling. It is necessary to encourage children and adults to critically observe reality, to orient themselves and read space and its qualities, to exercise their critical spirit in order to consciously read their living environment and to advance, tomorrow, the claim for adequate and qualified living spaces: space education is, to all intents and purposes, political action.
