Diversity - a resource for the architectural education

Call for papers / First announcement

Given the increasing globalization trend, architectural culture has brought to the forefront diversity as a quality and an essential condition of the contemporary architecture. The superficial understanding of architectural diversity was somehow encouraged by its evaluation as an act of “absolute freedom” which led to the denial of any contextual, historic and community shaping factors. And why not, it may be also a certain amount of laxity involver in the approach of the architecture, the city and the study of the architecture it self.

A serious consideration of the diversity as a fundamental issue for the European architectural education cannot possibly evade a debate about the diversity of the European cultural traditions, the way they relate to each other and to other cultural traditions; about the intense ‘’image storming” – standardized to a world deliberately detached from our very reality – and the way they reflect themselves both in the architectural and urban traditions in various European spaces and in the present configuration of the territory as a whole, of the urbanized one in particular.

Architectural education should acknowledge the fact that people live today simultaneously in multiple contexts (real and/or virtual) and at the same time of an increased interest for specific identities determined by a certain cultural tradition related to a territory, even if this one is no longer

Keynote speakers personalities to be announced in the next memo

• Constantinos Spiridonidis
• Dagmar Richter
• Raymond Sastre
• Hilde Heynen
• Ana Maria Zahariade
• Alexandru Sandu

• Marica Solomon
• Nicolae Lascu