Learning in a transmission situation

Abstract

The Terrains d'architecture workshop makes learning to design architecture the place where architecture and anthropology come together. The text shows how, over time, the articulation of practices has taken on other forms, how it has been enriched by turning the fieldwork into a genuine problematisation, a kind of ethnography of the commission. The abattoirs of Anderlecht occupy a central place in this process, because it was in this field that the notion of the public began to demand greater consistency and nuance, and that a specific gesture was developed, that of importing. Importing what affected us and what appeared to us to be a strength of this site: these abattoirs and the possibility of arranging them differently in their neighbourhood and in the city. The text emphasises the links between the teaching situation and the project situation. What is done in the learning environment, in this case the project workshop, can also count outside it, provided that we do not confine ourselves to a sterile division of roles between practices. We need to try out other ways of articulating things, refusing to play the role of killjoy, leaving the field of representations, taking the architects at their best - their predisposition to look to the future and project situations into it, to work out scenarios - and learning with them to give consistency to these scenarios. Speculating with consistency: neither utopia nor ready-made vision.