PREREQUISITES OR PRIOR KNOWLEDGE TO STUDY THE SUBJECT
Prerequisites for taking this course are not purely academic but merely motivational. On one hand it requires
a high personal interest to embark on a process that is away from any architectural procedural convention;
on the other hand student should be predisposed to engage in collaborative work with students
universities (Democritus University of Thrace and Aristotle University
of Thessaloniki in Greece, and University of Minas Gerais in Brazil),
through an essential ‘partnership agreement’ previously signed by all
the parties involved.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE SUBJECT
The subject Pop Up Islands: Architectures that appear and disappear
operates from the postproduction, that is, the manipulation of
pre-existing material, to act over it and finish setting it in
The work is done in three people teams, unknown to each other, one from
each university involved in the
progress of each term.
How to start a project manipulating foreign materials?
How to collaborate with strangers?
How to negotiate terms of engagement and establish effective joint working patterns?
How to produce and think through graphical tools?
How to draw up communicable documents without us being present to explain them?
How to describe the architectural space through instruments others than mere drawings?
How to realize the whole process in a document that assumes architectural conventions?
Responding to the above questions the subject reproduces, at this stage of training, the working dynamics
that the student will find on his way out of university, and preparing him/her for that is precisely the
Three systems are managed to distribute teaching materials for the course:
1) The statement of the course comes in paperback DIN A-6 format and picks the course content, citations,
references necessary for students to expand their information, images, documentation, examples, previous
years works, calendar for presentations and pace of work, with the intention of providing students with the
opportunity to have all the necessary information for a good development of the course.
2) Besides, every week a carefully chosen text is delivered in the class to all students in order to complement
the theme that is being treated that week. It is always an interdisciplinary text with great interest and
3) In parallel, the last day of class each week, lectures are given by various guests. Those lectures will raise
issues directly related to the forthcoming presentations of students. These talks are part of the Proyecto
de Innovación Docente ‘Aproximaciones Periféricas. Aprendizaje Transversal en la Experiencia Colectiva’
(Teaching Innovation Project "Peripheral approaches. Transversal Learning in the Collective Experience")
Although the student has developed the work in a team, the evaluation process has been different,
depending on the student's university. Thus, each teacher was able to evaluate the difficulties that students
have faced in their university context.
According to the teachers of Democritus University of Thrace, their context is very homogeneous. For this
reason, they have evaluated positively the risk taken by their students, who took distance of the already
known and faced the new situations.
Teachers have evaluated the architectural value of the resulting work; the spatial quality, the complexity
assumed, the developed program and the construction drawings. Regardless of this, the evolution of the
team’s work within the team with unknown members has been crucial for the final evaluation. Teachers at
the University of Minas Gerais have evaluated; on the one hand the strategic use of the diagram, because
it is a very useful tool in the social context of Brazil. On the other hand, they have evaluated the different
scales of approaching in the project definition. This is something not usual in Brazilian schools.
The professors of the Polytechnic University of Madrid have evaluated the set of proposals by the
heterogeneity between them. Individually, they have evaluated the ability of producing strangeness while the
ability to solve the project.
The evaluation appreciates; that the project assumes a programmatic and material complexity at the same
time; that the definition accompanies the ambition of the proposal; that the documents are accurate graphics.
The teamwork is evaluated like a trigger of the creative process to arrive at the results. It is not appreciated if
it has not been able to stimulate the process.