Climatic Heterotopias as Spaces of Inclusion: Sew Up the Urban Fabric

From the Introduction:
...Being based on Feyerabend’s epistemology (1993), I wanted to create an open-ended horizontally organized architectural design studio to fight against the “tyranny of the method”. The approach that stipulates that everything goes, anything works, it is above all my central argument with the aim to restore the individual mind of my students in its fundamental capacities of critical examination, and not only to deliver the process of production of architectural knowledge from chaos. This is why I give them the opportunity to express themselves through writing and to publish a book that is composed of texts of all of us. Thus, even though I accompanied the pedagogical praxis with my theoretical lectures during our project sessions, I argue here that the ultimate decision-making power must rest with the students’ individual will, in order to be credited with inexhaustible creativity and inventiveness in themselves, if, however, they are not contained by my outside intervention as an “expert”. In other terms, within this architectural design studio, we are all searching for a common and personal truth “inwards” and “from the bottom”. For this reason, the “climatic heterotopias” architectural designPreface xi studio aims to introduce in the architectural teaching the tortuous techniques of Socratic dialectic. I focus on establishing an environment where the pedagogical praxis is an explicit reference to maieutic, that is, to the art of giving birth to spirits, enhancing students’ creativity. I smoothly intervened in their texts, and I certainly didn’t want to transform their personal narratives into rigid academic reports/essays, even though I admit that some passages may appear immature to the “ossified expert” reader. This “imperfection”, however, is the seductive element of this book that makes it unique in comparison to other similar pedagogical handbooks. Alternatively, since I personally find every text very rich in terms of ideas, I desired to give theoretical value to the non-academic intellectual models that are sketched within these instinctive and introspective personal narratives. I decided, instead of changing their texts, to introduce in the form of comments an open public dialogue inserting academic references that deepen the introspective narratives of my students. Through this decision, I also intend to place the reader within the architectural studio, making her/him part of our learning community. This history explains the form of the book. The book you hold on your hands is not a systematic treatise; it is an open introspective public dialogue between a tutor and his students mutually addressing their particular foibles. So, I invite the reader to read beyond the texts and to imagine the rich potential that can be asserted to the spaces that have been conceived on the basis of this liberating exercise. In other terms, I invite the reader to observe throughout the pages of this book how a common dynamic identity is formulated without imposing prerogatives and methodological doctrines. The main tool that has been used is an open dialogue with the members of our small experimental community in order to enhance introspection. Being based on Feyerabend (1993), my main intention is to learn to my students how “to be ad hoc”, pushing their hypotheses thoroughly, without worrying about whether these hypotheses are true or not, which is only possible after the fact, or in other terms after the construction and operation of their spatial arguments. For me, this is the only way to exasperate their Castoriadian “radical imaginary”. Conclusively, through my pedagogical praxis, I attempt to promote an environment where each student is committed, with a maximum ofxii Climatic Heterotopias as Spaces of Inclusion conviction in the realization of a scientifically and artistically thought-out and reasoned architectural project which, undoubtedly, includes many uncertainties, but which, if it were not accompanied by uncertainties, would not have been an architectural project. The outcome of each student’s proposal may not be guaranteed in advance but has nevertheless been rigorously conceived, from an overview of all its implications (social, spatial, etc.), the most important of which consisted of a global reconfiguration of the concept of natural reality, putting an end to the architectural reproduction of a closed contemporary world whose laws blindly follow dominant architectural and spatial speculative narratives, as well as the laws of economy that continuously transform space to merchandise.

Lazaros MAVROMATIDIS
Strasbourg, May 2020