Ricerc@Sapienza

The experimental workshop practice found, in the last fifteen years, more and more space in the schools of architecture. It consists on a design experience able to train the student, in a short or a medium duration time, in the processing speed, in the organization of the development and in the synthesis ability: a design process based on the dialectic among debate/clash and conflict/dialogue with the consequent search for a design proposal as a result of cultural, methodological, linguistic and communicative integration of various participants. It is a pedagogical and cultural exercise, even before than technical, which incorporates and declines in new forms the practice of the ex tempore. Indeed, the workshop finds its remote roots right in the design ex tempore, that is the written test which, in the faculties of architecture, was presented as a designing exercise taking place in a limited time, usually within the three/four hours, on a specific topic within one year monodisciplinary course. An essential step to exercise and test the skills of the individual student or of a small group of students. Starting from these considerations and from the awareness, by now known, of the increasing necessity of processing speed, development organization and of the synthesis ability, in order to address the complexity required by design activity, the workshop is a working methodology that recovers the idea of ex tempore, and tests the potentiality in different forms, in government administrations, research organizations and universities. The workshop extends and reinterprets the ex tempore test, necessarily as a collective practical work, on a specific design theme in response to a real need detected in a given territory. The academic workshop is developed in a period that usually goes from five/six days up to a maximum of fourteen days, starting from the presentation of the study area. The local actors (institutions, public authorities, cultural operators) or directly the teachers from the proposer university formulate the demand for projects coming from the city and/or from territories. The workshop argument is verified and supported by the first site inspection in the project areas, that opens the scenario of direct knowledge in the field. So is launched the diagnostic and project path during which students compare themselves to the knowledge and, above all, they absorb the demands of those who inhabit the investigation places, without the filter of local actors and/or of the reference teachers. Students interview the inhabitants, they return several times in the project areas, they strengthen, solidify and re-discuss the initial beliefs and certainties, acquired from the class training and (... as often happens), thrown into crisis by the report/verification of real everyday needs of those who live and inhabit the places to rethink. From the didactic point of view, the cognitive process put in place is highly effective: the student, through active learning, acquires awareness and starts the interaction between new knowledge and his cultural background, feeling 'architect’ called to give a comprehensive and non -sectorial response. Ultimately, the student, with his working group, is thrown into a new reality that simulates the professional environment, with all its issues, different from the ones he can experiment in the classroom. The collaboration and the teamwork in a national and/or international context, the continuous debate with the institutional actors and stakeholders (customers, administrators, residents, etc.) lead students to develop skills of interaction and mediation: It becomes crucial being able to establish, manage and maintain good relations, to respect others, to collaborate finding a balance between the own project ideas and priorities with those of the group, and to respect the time schedule given. Not least, the ability to deal with conflicts, to recognize them