Socially Situated Pedagogies as a Strategy to Innovate Architectural Curricula: The Case Study of SArPe and Its Design Studio Experimentation at the University of Pavia

The authors discuss a pedagogical experiment that arises out of an ongoing Erasmus+ project titled “Socially Situated Architectural Pedagogies” or SArPe, which involves the Universities of Pavia, Istanbul, TU Delft and Malaga. SArPe project situates itself in between three areas of inquiry: critical/radical pedagogies (Colomina et al., 2022; Crysler, 1995; Dutton & Mann, 1996; Hooks, 2014); situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988; Rendell, 2020) and commons-oriented knowledge and pedagogy (Bourassa et al., 2017; Deamer, 2022; Korsgaard, 2019). On that basis, the paper aims to critically analyze architectural pedagogy through authors’ positioning in respect to the wider debate and a case study-based approach. Namely, a second-year architectural studio held at the University of Pavia in a.y. 2022-2023. Here the studio is reimagined as a site for commoning of knowledge through collaborations with non-academic actors; challenging hierarchical position between learners and educators; and experiment practice of dialogue. By doing that, it seeks to broaden reflections on how architectural studio can reconnect to the outside world and, more particularly, how learners and educators (and their mutual positioning) engage with non-institutional stakeholders. As such a transformative-relational pedagogy is experimented, which activates the traditional studio towards a socially situated pedagogical practice that promotes self-organization, encourages active participation and destabilases hierarchies.