‘Proyectos Zero’: Activating Communities of Practice to Welcome 1st Year students

Abstract

Proyectos Zero is a pedagogic experiment that has taken taken place, since 2011, in the first year design course in the University of Alicante, Spain. As I will show in this paper, it has become one of the pillars that explains our pedagogic model reinforcing and bringing it forward. From the beginning, the course involved young architects as tutors to introduce new students to architectural design and to the school. The historical conditions of design teaching have led to understand the course of design as the one integrating the disparate knowledges acquired in different courses. The Bolonia Process though, introduced design in first year offering the possibility of an autonomous course with its own content: one that aims to emotionally mobilize the students and link their subjectivity to a starting formative path in which they learn how to be an architect. From my experience in the course, first as tutor and, after some years, as coordinator, I explore the implications of that content for the structure of the course and the relations between the school and the community. Relying in Lave and Wenger’s idea of a community of practices, I understand the tutor as an intermediate figure between the new come student and the teacher, key for the success of an experiment that lies deeply in their presence: instead of objective contents and abilities, we have affective and subjective ones that come into the teaching room along their tentative steps in the architectural community of practices. Thus, the pedagogic space of design turns into a space of creative undergoing for all people involved into recreating, and thus make anew, the whole of the community of practices of architectural design.