Crossing the Plane: Learning Architecture through Performativity

Abstract

This article examines how performative pedagogical practices can reorient architectural education in the face of the contemporary ecosocial crisis. Drawing on three situated experiences—Inmersiones contrastadas, Al margen, and Sin distancia—developed in Venezuela, Colombia, and Chile, it advances a mode of learning that displaces disciplinary representationalism toward corporeal inscription, improvisation, and informality as epistemic agencies. These practices demonstrate that the precarious does not constitute a deficit, but rather a critical operator that intensifies attention and affect, transforming the classroom into a space of sensitive cohabitation. In productive friction with Research by Design, they do not reject its legitimizing impulse but destabilize its teleological formalization, proposing instead a situated rigor grounded in contingency and vulnerability. The article concludes that performing architectural learning is not a methodological complement, but a radical transformation that shapes architects-terrestrial, capable of inhabiting both living and mineralized territories in interdependent ways.