Enseñanza de la arquitectura en Chile, 1999-2019. Potencial ecológico y sentido político colectivo de las prácticas del proyecto

Over the last two decades, the higher education system has visibly tended to standardise university parameters and this process has also affected the internal functioning of Chilean architecture schools. Nevertheless, the political and collective sense reflected in the demands of the new student generation has challenged public policy and the discipline’s pedagogy. In a context of institutional inertia, architecture schools have failed to show reactivity and have not always responded to students’ concerns in a thoughtful and purposeful way. We can observe, however, three pedagogical actions in Chile which – following a radical line proper to the sixties – challenge the normative thoughts, thus questioning and reorganising disciplinary aspects. In so doing, they lead to a rethinking of the ecological potential of the training communities. In such cases, teaching is understood as a central practice, relying on a different relationship between teachers and students. They mix practice with research as they seek to strengthen the collective idea of a community through the academic exercise of a project. In this article, we describe and analyse the conditions that allow these pedagogical actions to emerge and the ecological potential of practice, as they bring about a political and collective meaning that can re-signify the architectural discipline via training.