Dr Paco Mejias Villatoro

The background of my teaching philosophy is based on the recognition of the importance of more liberal education in the world of the future. The old-modern ideology, focusing on the importance of practical thinking, commanded academia's ideology during most of the twentieth century. This focus worked in an era where productivity was the most crucial issue, and professional roles were exceptionally well defined. However, this approach is no longer useful. The uncertainty and complexity of the contemporary world have distorted traditional professional fields and disciplines, demanding more community-involved work, stronger interdisciplinary cooperation and recuperation of the role of any kind of expert as a critical socio-political thinker.
Instead of 'how-to-produce' teaching, it is now time to teach 'how-to-think' as a way to prepare professionals to be able to deal with the thrilling challenges of the near future.

To accomplish this idea, my teaching philosophy is summarized in four statements:

1.- SOCIO-POLITICAL INVOLVEMENT
It is difficult to think of being an architect without engaging the community for whom we are working. A socio-political responsibility doesn't necessarily mean a particular ideological affiliation but a persistent engagement with the community's improvement. To be political means always to consider what is best for the community first, as the necessary output of our work. The modern architect's selfish attitude must shift to a more social role as a problem mediator.

2.- INTERDISCIPLINARY COOPERATION
There is, in the very essence of architecture, a necessity to receive comprehensive feedback from different and often disparate pieces of knowledge and disciplines, which include economic, social and environmental perspectives at the least. If historically this has been implicitly so, the characteristics of the contemporary world make cooperative work an imperative. The university is the perfect place to train in this interdisciplinary approach, taking advantage of the different knowledge and expertise in the vicinity – conditions that are rarer in a practitioner's environment.

3.- THEORETICAL RESEARCH
We need to always keep in mind that architecture is a practice that is extremely dependent on our critical senses as the main tool for the decision-making process. The architect must always be critically active, acquiring updated information about the flow of different theoretical approaches in order to compare and calibrate them. A strong theoretical background provides architects with a wide cultural perspective for making the necessary guiding statements. As a thinker, an architect has to be able to provide challenging directions for ways to build our artificial environment in coexistence with the natural, while fulfilling people's expectations.

4.- PRACTICE FOCUS
In balance with the previous statement, but not in opposition to it, my philosophy emphasizes the importance of the built object. Only through built architecture can we respond to the real complexity of our discipline, obtaining the necessary agreements from the community and incorporating the technology that services architectural concepts. Built architecture is the most effective test for verifying our ability to combine the synergies for solving complex problems and a definitive way to explicitly recognize people's inhabitation as the most crucial of our targets.

The real challenge for the future is to be able to address these statements without dismissing our responsibility towards the quality of architecture. Consideration of people's concerns and expectancies does not mean a renouncing of our capabilities. The new architect's role as a social and political mediator must be assumed with a total engagement with our discipline. This means a tireless exploration of architecture's possibilities for making people's lives in the artificial environment more physically comfortable and more emotionally exciting.

Modules for 2023-24