Architectural Education has always been under great scrutiny; there is not a single advancement in other disciplines, an invention of some kind or a technological breakthrough that has not somehow affected the content or the methodology of architectural studies. This fluidity has extended architects’ activities and their theoretical discourse in a way that today, it is extremely difficult to come up with a single definition of what an architect is.

In the meantime, the evolving importance of cities to modern societies has led the architects in an endless quest to better understand the urban phenomena and map the cities’ complexity. In this context, architectural study programs will never seize to undergo continuous transformations just like the cities -their main corpus of investigation- have had in the past decades.

In addition, an increasingly wider online learning community challenges the limits of the traditional educational models. The courses we are planning now involve online educational practices that extend the physical time and space limits of the classroom. Most importantly, our understanding of the learning process has shifted from an instruction based model to a more open environment of human interaction where both the instructor and the students participate in a mutual exchange of information and personalized views of the world.

This educational framework opens up the way to even more scenarios of interaction between architects and communities. If the first are mainly involved in the planning of cities, then how do they relate to the latter? Can architectural education promote a new model of interaction and exchange between architects and the people? The undergoing transformation involves two different but equally important itineraries: from the emancipated student to the reflective practitioner and from the unwary crowd to the enmeshed participants.

This was originally a personal diary of architectural education research. In the past few years I had collected numerous articles, web pages, papers, reports and related information that had become impossible to manage. The blog helped me organize this material as well as provide you with a map of my readings. There are a lot of personal favorites here and individuals whose work has been extremely inspiring to me. I take this opportunity to thank all the people who upload their research findings making it possible for me to retrieve all this valuable information and to ultimately make my own connections.

In past couple of years, information on this blog has taken another turn, this time towards circularity. I thought a lot about creating a new one, but the issues that are raised by circularity are immensely interrelated with education and therefore I decided against that.  There is still a new blog, but that belongs to my new group: Full Circle Collaborative. Together with Markus Berger and Clarisse Labro we are planning a series of activities related to circularity in Eleonas (Athens). Covid has altered our plans, but it has not limited our creativity nor our willingness to realize them. 

So, here I am, getting ready for new adventures. I am happy to have you on board. 

A few words about me.

Architect Engineer “Sapienza” – Rome & AUTH, MSc NTUA, PhD NTUA.  She Is Assistant Professor at Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at TU Delft at the department of AE+T and the chair of Building Product Innovation. Between 2014-2019, she lectured at the National Technical University of Athens, School of Architecture and also at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Thessaly in Volos  (2010-2011; 2013-2014; 2018) and the University of Portsmouth branch in Athens where she was Leader of the Techne Unit (2015-2017). She was also a senior researcher at NTUA for the Horizon 2020 Program SoPHIA. Her research and her PhD relate to architectural education and online learning. Her latest research focuses on circularity in education and the circular built environment. She has participated in international conferences, while her work has been published in both conference proceedings and scientific journals. She also has an extensive design and built architectural work portfolio.

For more information about her design work please visit: ioannoukarvelas.gr