Revolución universitaria

Ilustración de CollabrATEC de la Universidad de Texas

Estos son los cuatro puntos de la revolución educativa en marcha:

• Educación centrada en el alumno
• Educación para toda la vida
• Educación por competencias
  
• Aprendizaje colaborativo
  

A los académicos españoles esta revolución los está dejando atrás. Su supuesto blindaje laboral (son funcionarios) les genera cierta apatía natural frente a la exigencias de cambio. Pero este blindaje puede estar a punto de resquebrajarse .

En Inglaterra, donde ocurre todo primero, el gobierno de coalición ha tomado la delantera y está revolucionando sus universidades, que ya están entre las mejores del mundo y aplican el nuevo paradigma educativo desde hace años. Mr. Cable, el equivalente al ministro de economía, ha dicho que vienen tres cambios fundamentales:

• Más universidades privadas
  
• Que paguen los que puedan
  
• Dejar quebrar a las universidades insolventes
  

Así como suena: las universidades con exceso de deuda tendrán que quebrar y sus alumnos serán rescatados por el estado. El gobierno calcula que caerán unas 20 universidades. The Guardian, ha publicado la noticia sobre el futuro de las universidades en UK. Mucho me temo que en España acabe haciendo lo mismo pero apremiados desde Bruselas y/o el FMI.

Good and Affordable houses

The picture comes from one of my favourite blogs: A Daily Dose of Architecture

Accordia is the name of the dwelling complex in Cambridge, UK, that has won the 2008 Stirling Prize. A good way to understand the excellence of this design and the criteria to achieve such a work is spending some minutes watching the video of CABE. Two years ago I published the article below in which the 20 questions of Building for Life (CABE's questionnaire that is on the video) are proposed as a guide to start mending the disaster of Spain's hounsing.
Construir para la vida

London book shops

Quinto of Charing Cross (photo by Pfig in Flickr)

Once Mario Vargas Llosa wrote that he loved to walk around the area of the British Library because there were the most amazing little book shops there. It is true: small spaces full of books, perfectly ordered and classified and there is always a book lover sitting in his/her desk working and delighted to talk about books.

It is true too that Charing Cross Road is as well a book's paradise. Shipley, Henry Pordes Books (ask for Gino), Any Amount of Books (they have a good blog) and, very specially, Quinto (in the picture).

Downstairs Quinto it is extraordinary, of course if you do not suffer claustrophobia. There I discovered a book written by the person with whom I was going to dinner that very night: that was one of the biggest surprises ever, because the book was 20 years old and the author a bit more than 80. Please, do not miss the pleasure of diving in the most amazing ocean of old books when you are in London. By the way, down Charing Cross is Cecil Court where there are even more old book shops specialized in any subject: music, oriental religion...

John Gray: contemporary thinking

John Gray's thinking is a good model for contemporary thinking, by which I mean the reflexive and skilful inteligence we need right now.

I have already recomended two of his books, Black Mass, last year just after he presented Critical Modernism, the book by Charles Jencks in the Royal Academy in London; and False Dawn, when commenting Hay Festival in Segovia.

It is very interesting to listen and watch this pragmatic philosopher thinking live on stage.

David Chipperfield at the IE University

Great Sunday. Having Chipperfield in our University has been a quite rewarding event.

Last Friday, at my studio, we were discussing what I've named architectural "didactism". Didactism is the pathology of architecture determined by explanations of the design process . It comes from design competitions: as the juries are normally neophyte in architecture (politicians, bureaucrats, managers) the proposals have to be easily explained, so much so that design teams tend to propose mainly what is easy to explain. Nevertheless, good architecture can't never be totally explained because it is done to be experienced, not to be understood.

Chipperfield, the best British architect at the moment, has perfectly demonstrated with his outstanding work since 1985 that he believes in architecture to be lived. He explicitly agrees with this point of view in the interview below (specially when he talks about recent architecture as "victim of methodological descriptions"). However, one might say that his own CAT Master Plan is sort of didactic (video). Anyway, I'm a sure that at the end the British-Spanish Dream Team (Chipperfield-Perea-Junquera-Sancho) will convert the Segovia CAT in the public paradise they (and we all) want it to be.

I told Mr. Chipperfield that on Friday we were studying his gorgeous Gallery in Berlin at my studio at the IE School of Architecture: that building is, as the majority of his work, one example of authentic architecture to be experienced. He was glad to hear that.

Ghosts in Segovia

Cockle-pickers at Morecambe Bay, Lancashire, UK

A car trapped by the tides at Morecambe bay, 400 meters from shore

Ai Qin Lin, who survived the Morecambe bay tragedy, and main character of the film

Ghosts is the way illegal Chinese immigrants and local British workers call each other. Ghosts is also the name of the documentary shown in Segovia last Sunday at the Hay Festival.

It is the true story of a group of 23 illegal Chinese workers that were killed in Lancashire, UK, in 2004. Nick Broomfield, the Director , said that there are 20 millions slaves in the world right now. He also has created a foundation to collect the half a million dollars the relatives of the killed worker have to pay the lenders. The film is an excellent example of art and politics interacting without contaminating each other: the suspense sequences are one of the best ever shoot.

I first knew about this tragedy few weeks ago while asking Rod Morgan (author of the Oxford Handbook of Criminology) about the exploitation of immigrants in the UK. Do not miss it, it is in DVD.

21st Century life in Georgian Spaces

Model of the city at the Building of Bath Museum
The Circus, 1754-69, John Wood Senr. and Jnr.

Inside a John Pinch georgian house, 6,60 mts wide aprox.

A special combination of regulations, cultural trends and business strategies are responsible for the impressive urban artifacts in Georgian Bath from 1667 onwards. The curious thing is that inside these buildings live people that still can enjoy some of the eighteenth and nineteenth century most admirable pleasures, such as long and civilized conversations, while most of them are up to date in the latest issues of the arts, technology and politics. This fact demonstrates that it is possible to have the best of every time, that we can vindicate the right not to choose. Modernity and tradition are compatible if we select the essential aspects of both.

Bath Spa, Somerset, England

Royal Crescent, photo by David Iliff (click on it to enlarge)

This is going to be the scenario of my summer. Bath is a very special city: all of it has been designed by the same hands and the same eyes. The order in Bath is not just in the space, it extends in many different ways to everyday life. Winston Churchill said in a speech at the Architectural Association in London that "we make buildings and afterwards the buildings make us".

To spend some time in such a beautiful city resets anyone´s soul. In the Abbey of Bath was crowned the first king of England 1035 years ago. How on earth do I remember such a date so precisely? Easy: I happened to be there on the 1000 anniversary. That is the purpose of celebrations isn't it?, to fix things in your mind and in your spirit.

Good summer holidays and see you in September.

The Oxford Conference: ¿ethics vs art?

photo: Tim Waters, Flickr

The conference on architectural education in Oxford has good intentions, but that is not enough I am afraid. The idea is literally to save the planet form artist-architects in the name of sustainability. The answer to this rather old good will is, again, in the historical avant-garde: “they claim to defend nature while poets respect it much more than gardeners”, used to say avant-garde artists at the beginning of the 20th century in defense of artistic abstraction. It is evident that there is still the need of explaining the precise artistic nature of architecture in contemporary times. A good start would be not to oppose ethics and art: that is pre-modern. Referring to Siza or Zumthor when talking about contemporary architecture (instead of Ghery and Starck) could also contribute to clarify what I suppose is our common enemy: spectacle and commoditization in architecture.

It is a pity that the conference does not take place at the St. Catherine´s College, the wonderful master piece by Arnee Jacobsen located precisely in Oxford. That work of architecture is capable of defending contemporary art all alone. By the way, the moralist stand of this 2008 Oxford Conference reminds me of the struggle against Jacobsen´s project in the oxfordian press of the time when the building was being constructed. Fortunately, some English schools have responded to the spirit of the conference: Brett Steele (Architectural Association) and Iain Borden (Bartlett) have struck back.

press release july08OXFORD CONFERENCE - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: press release july08OXFORD CONFERENCE

The "occult powers of mobile phones" and the New Modern

What to read in the summer...? How about Black Mass by John Gray and Critical Modernism by Charles Jenks.

Why they should be read?. Well, I recomend them for two reasons. First, because it is not so easy to find intense reflexions on the present, on what is happening in our lives. Second, because Gray is considered "the most important philosopher alive" and he is the one Charles Jenks chose to back his new agenda at the Royal Academy in London last autumn. I find fascinating the intellectual moves from the New Right to New Labor (Gray) and from Post-modernism to Critical Modernism (Jenks). There is not better medicine for kantian idealists that big doses of post-ideological thinking: have a nice summer.

Londres fresco

Se está preparando el Festival de Arquitectura de Londres. Se trata de una auténtica fiesta urbana con exposiciones, paseos (a pie, en bicicleta, en barco), conferencias, visitas guiadas, instalaciones urbanas, debates, fiestas...en fin, cuando en Inglaterra le ponen la etiqueta de Festival a algo hay que tomárselo en serio. Los organizadores siguieren que "fresco" es el tema del evento: piden que se vea Londres con ojos frescos para redescubir el talento fresco y que se respire el aire fresco de la ciudad (han logrado descontaminar su aire de una manera notable). Pues eso, a refrescarse.

El medio es el mensaje (unas veces más que otras)

La web padece de narcisismo. Lo digo porque lo que más abunda en la red es gente hablando de la red (yo mismo, por ejemplo), aunque es innegable la potencialidad que tienen las TIC para el conocimiento: ya sabéis cómo me entusiasma este medio. Una novedad que está a medio camino entre ambas cosas (nuevo formato y contenidos realmente interesantes) es el libro virtual Piel. Sólo se puede ver en internet y gratuitamente este libro, ya que no existe copia en papel (cosa que es posible que nunca suceda).

Sus páginas se pasan en la misma pantalla con el ratón tal como si fuera el propio dedo. El contenido no está mal, si se prescinde de la inconsistente introducción y del hecho de que el mismo concepto de piel (en sustitución del de fachada) es posiblemente vacío en arquitectura. La fotos y algunos de los edificios reseñados irregularmente en el libro hacen que valga la pena echarle un vistazo.El edificio que se entrevé en la foto (el de la página derecha) es un complejo de oficinas en Zurich proyectado por Camenzind Evolution y que recibió el International Award del RIBA 2005. Revisarse estos premios de vez en cuando, leyendo con detenimiento las memorias concisas que los acompañan, eso sí que no tiene desperdicio.