Professional Practice in the Academic Environment: Associating Research, Teaching and Extension

Authors: Guilherme Lassance, Patricia Figueira Lassance, Elaine Garrido Vazquez, Ivete Farah, Paulo Fernandes Neves Rodrigues e Pedro Engel Penter.

Article published in FAU UFRJ Magazine, issue 3, pages 18 - 23, year 2013.

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Introduction

 

    Despite the evident transformation in the contemporary ways of thinking and designing architecture, there still has a persistent lack of articulation of the professionals involved. The division of labor inherited from the historic separation between eighteenth-century architects and engineers has been intensified with the increasing specialization of the actors currently involved in the design process. The autonomy of views and approaches is guided by the growing independence of specialists, and has as its main consequence, a very low level of evolution of specification standards in building projects, compared to other creation and production areas.

    The formatting of professionals of construction tends to consolidate as technical training averse to innovation. Proceeding in this way, the academy satisfies the interests of the construction industries in the sense of standardizing its processes and products. This type of scenario creates conditions that are very unfavorable to the current challenge of sustainability challenges, and implies, on the opposite, a much greater synergy between specialists in processes and integrated solutions.

    In this sense, it is necessary to observe a double isolation: the separation between teaching and professional practice, supported by the distance between university and society, and the fragmentation of contents in disciplinary specialties, which make the curricular grades of our courses more and more compartmentalized, in contradiction with the intentions of those who have long advocated and still advocate the constitution of a disciplinary field of the sciences of conception (SIMON, 1969; CROSS, 2007).

 

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A structure for professional practice in the academy

 

    Moved by the will to combat this isolation, we have, since 2006, created a project structure capable of providing an integrated teaching experience. It is about organizing, in the academic field, a professional activity focused on the provision of services by the university to society in general.

    The creation of this structure had two main origins. The first one comes from above and is related to a general policy of the current rectory, which aims to stimulate and develop university extension activities capable of provoking and promoting favorable conditions for the integration of the different courses offered. This policy is based on the assumption that the university's role must transcend its traditional teaching and research functions, linking them to concrete actions of service to the population and especially to its most deprived and generally excluded part of the access to the classrooms Higher education (FARIA, 2001).

    The second source is part, as opposed to the first, from the bottom up, of individual initiatives of a new generation of project teachers dissatisfied with a model of practical teaching unrelated to professional practice, merely mirroring (BUCHAMAN, 1998).

   Taking advantage of here and there opportunities for concrete action on the space of the university itself, this type of initiative has revealed a favorable field to the design teaching, which is detailed by a professional practice that - performed in an academic environment - has more favorable conditions for the critical exercise indispensable to pedagogical experiences at the university level.

 

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Work infrastructure

 

    The organization of this structure was boosted by the opportunity of a larger project, a three thousand square meter building designed to research laboratories. The experience involved teachers and students from more than 20 different courses, including Architecture and Urbanism and Civil Engineering courses, now separated into separate centers.

    Contrary to this separation and taking advantage of the successes and the visibility conquered internally and externally by the teaching team and student through this first experience, we set up a work infrastructure that today occupies about 500 square meters of rooms of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism. This physical structure whose equipment and work tools were consisted as counterparts of the more than 150 projects carried out or in progress, receives interns from the architecture and various engineering areas. It also aggregates post-graduation programs, seeking to unify and strengthen the device of professional practice in academic environment.

 

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Figure 1. Arquilab working environment.

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Curriculum insertion

 

    In 2006, the creation of the Atelier Universitário Arquilab coincided with the implementation of an ambitious undergraduate curricular reform in the course in Architecture and Urbanism of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. However, it was not a mere coincidence, but a joint action aimed at developing a greater internal and external integration of the course.

    Produced and discussed during the three years prior to its implementation, the new structure offers a series of changes that seek to articulate teaching, research and extension. Among the main changes are the organization of the course in three cycles, whose second phase goes from the 5th to the 8th semester, succumbing to the first two-year foundation period, is now openly focused on deepening project knowledge (PEIXOTO and LASSANCE, 2006). This cycle includes the new requirement of the MEC Curriculum Guidelines for a mandated supervised professional internship, as well as a new range of thematic design workshops (ATP), addressing the issues with great potential for professional project opportunities.

    The combination of these changes has clearly favored the institutionalization of the Atelier as a privileged structure to accommodate professional training. This is due to two main reasons: the first is related to the fact that supervision becomes easier due to the proximity of a learning center developed in the university. The second reason concerns the fear that the internship may become even more precarious with its compulsory character, which would make the trainee even more dependent and subject to conditions imposed by the labor market. In addition, we saw a unique opportunity to apply and implement architectural research, which usually faces a lot of difficulty in articulating with professional practice.

 

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Figure 2. The table shows the principle of inclusion of the Atelier in the new curricular design of the Graduation Course in Architecture and Urbanism of the FAU / UFRJ, through the obligatory stage. Source: Course Coordination, FAU / UFRJ

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The need to delimit the field of work

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    Despite these very favorable conditions, the biggest problem we face is the definition of the scope of professional activities that we would develop with this type of structure. The problem of delimitation of the field involves deep prejudices such as: unfair competition with the offices, lack of professional competence and academic commitment, or slowness of design processes involving teaching and research.

    To meet the challenge of defining criteria for desired practice, we seek precedents to be used as factual arguments establishing institutional conditions. Several references allowed the recognition of this activity as something that should not be confused with a traditional office focused on technical services, nor as a project teaching atelier usually alienated from professional responsibilities.

    A first precedent could be observed in a visit to the Faculty of Architecture of the National University of Mexico (BOTELLO, 2005). This was inspired by the established model of University research centers in Engineering, which concentrates much of the project activity and technical study of private engineering firms, unable to withstand the successive crises that plagued our Latin American economies.

   However, the main reference was provided by the privileged relationship with the various organs of the academy: the University Hospital. This structure, whose existence is considered essential for the quality of a medical school, is conceived as a means of practical training for professions in the medical field. In addition, it associates two interesting aspects: the clinic and the laboratory, which is a public service dedicated to society and a leading research that gives meaning to the academic structure and distinguishes it from other public health facilities.

    The University Hospital provides important means to justify the need and possibility of recovering a project activity in an academic environment, which can’t be limited to the social assistance service commonly associated with the University extension activity, but should also include activities of interest Associated with the urgent development of research and innovation in architecture (LASSANCE, 2008).

    Indeed, this analogy allowed us to confront the false idea of unfair competition with professional structures, instead promoting the recognition of the complementary role that this type of structure can play as a scientific partner of the vast majority of offices whose scale, organization and economic fragility prevent the creation and maintenance of a real research and development sector capable of counteracting the logic of the standardization of real estate and construction markets in Brazil.

     The great achievement allowed by such analogy is yet to come. It is the recognition of the activity of conception as a means of scientific research. This is what brought us closer to other references, among them, the experience developed by the Masters in Architecture of the Catholic University of Chile, presented in a lecture given by José Rosas, at the last Projetar conference in São Paulo (ROSAS, 2009). This experience illustrates a new field of possibilities for the development of real projects in an academic environment conducive to the flourishing and strengthening of an innovative practice, based on the search and development of new theories, rules and design procedures that behalf adaptation of the design processes in the face of constant changes in the realities of professional performance, and the consequent acquisition of transversal competences in Architecture teaching (ROSAS, 2007).

 

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Figure 3. Project for the new Biology Institute of UFRJ (view of the main façade).

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Control of the design process and integration of innovation

 

    The organization of this type of structure is inspired by already consolidated practices of technical advice generally associated to the research centers of the Universities. However, the organization seeks to transcend this simple University-Enterprise partnership, in order to put into practice a professional activity in which academia does not only play a role of technical-scientific support for professional bodies, but instead assumes control of the Project as a whole.

    The motivation to take control is justified by the urgent need to create more favorable conditions to face a double challenge, which concerns a greater integration in the conception process as well as the real possibility of innovation. Therefore, it is necessary to break with the professional practices of civil engineering and architecture that tend, in most cases, to perpetuate uncritical procedures of reproduction of solutions and specifications standardized and conditioned by the field of technology already consolidated by the market and by the construction industry.

    An integrated conception - supported by the articulation of specialized knowledge - implies an effective participation of the different specialists from the first stages of the conception process. In the initial moments, decisions that have a strong impact on the project are taken, in which architects are often left out of dialogue with other professionals tending to favor schemes already known, or rehearsing a more daring, precariously inspired solution in an stylist reference. Even in this case, in which innovation will be attempted, the specialists - encapsulated in their hermetic knowledge and left out of the conception process because they have been late called - will be responsible for distorting any attempt to weaken their intended field of competence and to counteract the summary reapplication of their formulas and revenues deducted from a blind respect for the rules in force.

    This is a true vicious cycle that ties engineering education to the perverse logic of conquest and defense of ever more specialized fields of professional competence, which multiply in a labor market in a frank and accelerated process of fragmentation, contributing actively to the compartmentalization of knowledge and the courses that spread them. For architects, deprived of their ancestral attributions, there remains the belief in a full and technical competence of the project, which can’t withstand the pressures of a construction industry interested in optimizing its investments thanks to the standardization of its processes and products.

    The pressures are even more sensitive when the constructive pattern becomes standard and gains force of law as in the case of public tenders that, in Brazil, restrict construction and finishing choices to a list of processes and products officially conditioned and justified by economic criteria that they do not, however, resist an overall cost analysis. Also excluded from the list are those processes and products whose industrialization and commercialization may be contrary to the noble but falsely correct principle of competition. As designers, we are legally prevented from implementing research on public works that should, on the contrary, provide privileged opportunities to promote innovation, precisely because they are not strictly conditioned to the commercial profit criteria of the private sector.

    Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop new means to combat this relentless dichotomy between professional practice and academic activity, especially in our disciplines so closely linked to the practical knowledge of the project.

 

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Figure 4. Project for the bookstore at FAU / UFRJ.

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Figure 5. Remodeling study of the Clementino Fraga Filho University Hospital after demolition of the south wing ('dry leg').

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Bibliographic references

 

BOTELLO, Thelma Lazcano. Proyectos de Vinculación 2001-2004. Cidade do Mexico: Faculdad de Arquitectura UNAM, 2005.

 

BUCHANAN, Richard. Education and Professional Practice in Design, Design Issues, vol. 4, nº 2, 1998.

 

CROSS, Nigel. Designerly ways of knowing, Design Issues, vol. 17, nº 3, 2001, p. 49-55.

 

FARIA, Doris Santos de (org). Construção Conceitual da Extensão na América Latina. Brasília: Editora da UnB, 2001.

 

LASSANCE, Guilherme. Do ambulatório ao laboratório: uma perspectiva para o ensino de projeto. Revista da FAU/UFRJ, nº 1, 2009, p. 26-31.

 

PEIXOTO, Gustavo Rocha; LASSANCE, Guilherme. Muitos personagens em busca de um conceito: certezas, dúvidas e reflexões sobre o novo currículo da FAU-UFRJ. Academia, v. 7, 2006, p. 8-11.

 

ROSAS, José. Disciplina, profesion y oficio: una confusion epistemológica en la ensenanza del proyecto. Em Ruth Verde Zein (ed.) O projeto como investigação: ensino, pesquisa e prática. Projetar 2009. São Paulo: Centro Universitário Mackenzie, 2009.

 

___. Investigación y Proyecto. MARQ, nº 2, Magister em Arquitectura, PUC-Chile, 2007, pp. 11-13.

 

SIMON, Herbert. The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969.