Fig. 1.
figure 1

Isochron map of the University City of Madrid: 30 min walk from ETSA Madrid.

Full size image

1 What Do They Learn? Beyond Academic Consumption

Remedios Zafra [1] argues that throughout the 20th century many thinkers have emphasized the shift towards the conversion of users into potential producers, from the texts of Walter Benjamin -especially The Author as Producer and The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility-, the studies on aesthetic reception in the art of the last century or the theories on Fordism and post-Fordism, to the texts by Mcluhan and Barrington Nevitt in the seventies on how technologies promote consumers to be producers in parallel. The term ‘prosumer’ has been extended to many fields.

The sphere of creation constitutes a space from which we contemplate the world as an opportunity, and there we also transform our role from that of consumers to that of producers or prosumers, as Remedios Zafra states. Indeed, if we can collaborate in any way in the attempt to improve things from the University, perhaps it would be to simultaneously promote the consumption and production of care, affection, relationships, goods, learning and knowledge; until now, our students have only been educated - when they have not been trained - as consumers. The transition from the Baccalaureate to university education is a circumstance that requires the effort of pedagogical strategies that facilitate and encourage a pleasant, non-traumatic transition. The group of students who enter architecture is characterised by a level of excellence in their qualifications in correspondence with an impressive capacity for work and effort, but this is not always accompanied by the necessary degree of maturity to consider and question their place in the world at all levels, as they come from educational systems in which they have been, for the most part, over-directed and in which their activity was limited to memorising, studying and taking assessment tests.

From the DAI (Drawing, Analysis and Ideation) course we explore collective scenarios for the production of learning that go beyond the consumption of didactic content, and rely on certain links generated by the learning community itself as the basis for such production. Our pedagogical strategy for DAI is organised according to an agenda that incorporates a double learning loop around space and teaching time.

2 Where Do They Learn? Beyond the Classroom Space

Students entering the ETSAM’s Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture and enrolling in the DAI course are mostly unfamiliar with the city in which they are going to study, and feel a certain fear of the new situation, their new classmates, and their new place of residence and work. On the other hand, the usual academic action that will enrich their cognitive dimension is governed by a high degree of abstraction. Baixas [2] points out that ‘although the creative and innovative production within this school and many others is enormous and admirable, the influence of such productions in the real city is still insufficient. We must, therefore, take care of this contact of our sphere of reflection and abstraction with the real world by means of a will to the real’. It would be good, therefore, if such a vocation for reality towards the everyday were present in academic action to counteract, among other impacts, the excessive abstract bias of didactic approaches. The ordinary becomes extraordinary when it is captured in the sketchbook: it is then that the city becomes the space of rich and complex learning, capable of breaking out of the ‘box’ where classes are taught and the ‘box’ of reductionist and conventional pedagogies (thinking out of the box) in favour of the creativity that lateral thinking brings, but also from the necessary learning of the ecological foundations of urban space.

The university as a continuous open space outside the institutional framework distances itself from the cabinet or laboratory learning proposed by pedagogies that pivot on the simulation of everyday life. It is worth referring to others that locate the object of study outside the space where it is studied, without the need to reproduce it. From this empirical perspective, the experience of learning outside the classroom refers to didactics "in the field" and to fieldwork procedures. In situ pedagogies invite students to work directly with the source or data of study, rather than starting from a simulation of the phenomenon in the encapsulated environment of the classroom. In the urban context, architecture is inevitably presented as the social product that it is, being conducive (for its teaching) to the use of learning or research methodologies that make it possible to understand the organisation, practices or relationships between social groups [3] that activate the complex ecology of the city.

The specialised literature evidences the value of this field experiential learning to promote the ability to learn how to learn. Authors such as Smith [4], Chisholm [5], Dillon [6] and Eaton [7] have made progress in analysing the keys and benefits of learning outside the classroom, as well as its impact and current relevance. That effective learning entails the possession of different abilities as concrete experience abilities and active experimentation abilities. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to illustrate a time-space model of experiential learning that facilitates leadership development in an undergraduate program. Ariza [8] states that The Manifesto for Learning Outside the Classroom was published in 2006 by the Department for Education and Skills at the University of Nottingham [9], and has since been explicitly endorsed by more than 1920 organisations and individuals, demonstrating the degree of acceptance and improved academic performance of this initiative. Among the conclusions it draws, it makes explicit an improvement in performance according to the following skills:

  • Develops tolerance for uncertainty and the ability to cope with new situations.

  • It promotes feelings of appreciation and preservation of the environment and favours the education of committed citizens.

  • Stimulates restlessness and creativity, associated with open-ended activities or problems.

  • It helps to develop contextualised, integrative and relational knowledge, to overcome subject barriers and to stimulate the development of complex cognitive structures that allow the interconnection of concepts and the ability to apply knowledge.

3 Spatial and Temporal Iteration: Between the Aula Museo and the (Campus) City

“Our intent is to explore the relationship of architectural values to significant human experience and in particular to basic educational goals – if and how the physical environment informs and shapes and liberates the human spirit”.

Van Eyck, A.; Hertzberger, H.; Ackerman, J.S.; De Carlo, G. et al., [10].

For the new drawing apprentices, entering the ETSAM (Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid) means discovering the campus, an area of the city of Madrid called Ciudad Universitaria, which gives its name to this metro stop on line 6, and which they may never have visited before. It seems no coincidence that our building is located on the edge of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), the furthest from the campus, next to the former School of Quantity Surveyors School (Escuela de Aparejadores), three meters below, and also far above, but neighboring, the School of Arts, now part of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

Leaving aside the very interesting psychogeographical theme and returning to our school, we have to say that the subject is taught in what is called the Aula Museo, a space that crosses the old School of Architecture building (1936) through the subsoil from north to south, below the Assembly Hall, and with a considerable span between beams. It is more than 5 meters high, with doors giving access through two English courtyards to the garden and the space between the pavilions.

Fig. 2.
figure 2

Source: Metalocus.

Model of the reconstruction of the University City of Madrid in 1943, 490 × 510cms (property of the Army Museum; in the custody of the Complutense University).

Full size image

This space of more than 300 m2 is undoubtedly a privileged place (Fig.5), full of history and legends. Once upon a time it was occupied by plaster statues; it seems that there were also chickens, which escaped from the house that the janitor had in a redoubt in the north corridor, and were used by teachers to introduce the drawing of movement, in which the bodies are not frozen like statues or photographs, but in which space-time is the object to be captured. We, their teachers, then occupy the classroom as students, with the same fears and the same illusion. And we too, their teachers, occupied the classroom, then drawing, with the same fears and the same enthusiasm, but for much longer. Perhaps precisely because of this, because of this feeling that we have always inhabited this place, there is something domestic in our teaching, together with a closeness motivated by the empathy of those who can occupy the place of others, and know how to recover the strangeness that the entrance to the Aula Museo caused the first time we went down to that half-dark basement, where it was said that the statues came to life at night. A classroom where there are no desks, where the first subject of the degree course is taught in which there is no syllabus, no notes, no exams and where the teachers do exactly the same as the students: draw.

Alicia se va de gira (Alicia goes on tour) gave its name to the DAI 2 pedagogy taught in the 2021-22 academic year between the confined space of the Aula Museo and the Ciudad Universitaria. The production of this unfinished and situated atlas was articulated through a sequence of twenty weekly exercises. In a system of progressive work, synchronized with our domestic rhythms, without stress or out-of-scale deliveries, each statement activated a format, a variable, a scale, a drawing technique and one of the many layers that configurate the city, a set of singularities to be explored in a spatial loop that organized the teaching week according to a first day of fieldwork action au plein air outside the classroom (Thursdays) and another of critical reaction in the Aula Museo (Fridays), although with a time lag of one week - the spatial and temporal loops did not occur in unison. Each new statement was explained by means of a lecture supported by a body of references. The work was done in teams, in groups of three, although sometimes the groups came together to form collectives of six, nine or even twelve members.

4 ETSAM: Permanent Centre of Gravity

The first academic year is an individual and existential challenge. As teachers, we help students to find a safe space, a point on a map of uncertainties and novelties. In the most poetic sense of Franco Battiato, in our course, the School of Architecture is simultaneously its permanent centre of gravity and our second home, where we go out and come back every day. The centrifugal action aimed to explore and recognise the territory collected in a thirty-minute walking isochrone (Fig. 1). Every Thursday we spent three hours of class time observing the school environment in situ, without differentiating whether it was built by human or non-human bodies: animals; plants; machines; stones..., in order to detect and record conflicts, problems, opportunities or specific situations that make up a landscape that is more than human. Through these drifts we appropriate each place by means of different forms of observation and recording, alternating the annotation drawing in a notebook of different papers for an active cognitive recording, with the use of mobile electronic devices. This data-taking is done from outside and inside, from near and far, and is complemented by other data taken from the internet elaborated by other people at other times (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3.
figure 3

Actions and layers in relation to the isochrone map.

Full size image
Fig. 4.
figure 4

DAI students drawing in the University City of Madrid, 2022. Author: Marta Montecucco.

Full size image

The atlas of statements compiled different proposals. Thus, Otear desde la colina (Looking down from the Hill) explored the ‘z’ axis of the university student; Okupar el puente (occupy the bridge) of the French speculated on a scenario of climate fiction and hyperdensity of housing; Hacer un pic-nic (Make a picnic) was investigating the colour of the images; Morir en CIU (Die in CIU) incorporated a narrative into the landscape. The latter traced a route to the Forensic Anatomical Institute, in the Faculty of Medicine, where we visited the Civil War model with the bombed campus and trenches and the rehabilitation project of 1943 (Fig. 2). Thus, in a first drawing from the footbridge of the A6 (Fig. 4) we explained the difference between an ecological drawing (exploratory action to discover possibilities for intervention in the environment.) and a representation drawing close to photography. Then we drew the Agronomists’ vegetable gardens; we drew the surroundings of the new lecture theatre of the Faculty of Pharmacy; sitting on the steps of the Faculty of Medicine, we drew Los portadores de la antorcha, the aluminium sculpture made by Anne Hyatt Huntington in 1950; and we ended up climbing between shell holes to the hill of the aeronautical school to capture in our notebooks the views of the Guadarrama.

After this action, it was proposed as a concatenated project to make a stop motion of the route, emphasising two or three selected places to die, those architectural enclaves that we would choose to leave the planet. The narrative of each story was presented on a storyboard and nourished by the imagination of each team (3 people). After all, this first initiation course is where, for the most part, students ‘die’ as first-time teenagers to be ‘reborn’ as future architects.

Fig. 5.
figure 5

Drawing practices at Aula Museo, ETSAM, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 2023.

Full size image

5 Conclusions

Sometimes the conventional linear time frame that organizes the academic year is not the best solution for students. The double learning loop incorporates into the subject of Drawing, Analysis and Ideation of the first year of the Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture the spatial iteration of learning inside and outside the classroom (Fig. 5), in asynchrony with a time cycle that guides the binomial analysis/project. Each weekly project statement is a challenge loaded with learning objectives that links an action of analysis outside the classroom - experiential learning in the city - with another action of project carried out in a team, which is extended as homework over the course of a week and whose critical session takes place in the space of the classroom. Therefore, in this pedagogical model, each weekly module presents a unique challenge enriched with specific learning objectives. The evolutionary process demonstrates a special dedication to continuous improvement and adaptability. This pedagogical model was first tested on the campus of the Ciudad Universitaria in Madrid, an essential nearby environment for first-year students.

Moreover, the collaborative nature of the projects, executed within a team framework, not only promotes teamwork but also extends the learning environment beyond the classroom walls. This strategy was tested for the first time in the pedagogy titled Alicia se va de gira (Alicia goes on tour) for the academic year 2021-22 and has evolved in the pedagogical Dorothy regresa a casa (Dorothy returns home) developed in 2022-23, a version that tested another type of temporal coupling of the learning loop. This evolution reflects a commitment to refining and adapting teaching methodologies for an enhanced teaching experience.