Knowledge and studio culture in portuguese architectural schools since Bologna

Abstract

The curricular harmonization of the European courses, the Bologna Process (1999-2009), relocated an emphasis in the specificity of architectural education inside a university environment. Nowadays, the architect’s basic training embraces a Master’s degree and compromises research as an educational purpose. Furthermore, doctoral courses and research centres are associated, framing funding and evaluation, and pressing an overall urge for professional academic production, which can move the schools away from the construction site into the library and the laboratory, turning the learning programs into extensions of the research ones. Therefore, in the halls of the design studio arise the researcher-teacher-designer, professor Clark Kent (Figueira, 2013). Within this scenario, the article exposes both the organizational, curricular and didactical evolutions in Portuguese schools, and inquires the models and the knowledge, transmitted and produced, trying to foresee any paradoxes requiring an epistemological clarification.