Learning by negotiating: reality is my playground

Abstract

This article develops the W.A.T.C.H., experience, an architectural design course realized jointly between university, city government, public institutions, private entities, cultural associations, civil society...  The projects have been implemented and enjoyed by citizens. However, the objective is not the reproduction of a certain professional model that is represented nowadays in the image of young architects collectives, but rather the development by the student of social intelligence, critical positioning and relational capacity as their own competencies. To this end, the course proposes a displacement of personal narrative relations, as a recurrent strategy in design courses, towards the creation of a radical experience of the real in which design become and exercise of latouranization of the city and in which their different agents become experts of "other" knowledge that is transferred to the architectural academic context.