How to Break Down Drawing Pedagogies by Decoding Disciplines on a Classic Board

Abstract

From the Enlightenment period many universities still embody a disciplinary Silo-structure to manage and bring knowledge together. As design is a field where creativity plays a seminal role, these disciplinary limitations must be frequently broken down to find new contents, if not innovative, at least up-to-date. In a School of Architecture learning to draw, as design methodology, is about creation procedures. Pedagogies become for novel students a deep immersion in such creation processes during the first-year course at the ETSA Madrid School of Architecture. This research describes a pedagogical case study called ‘Hadrian and Miralles go on a trip’. It explores different teaching strategies to achieve an updated interdisciplinary framework that intensifies current learning outcomes in times of COVID19. The pedagogical device sets up a catalog of Silo-busting strategies like the Analogical Turn, a fragmentary but inclusive approach carried out by the Spanish architect Enric Miralles. Given the impossibility of traveling to Rome for the pandemic outreach, the full Villa Adriana was drawn, dissected, and rethought at the ETSAM main hall, in what we consider to be an exceptional pedagogy for a pandemic time.