Awakening Imaginaries. An educational experience: The project workshop as an intersection of biographies

Abstract

The present research shows the results of an innovative proposal in the field of architectural project teaching, posing as scenario the connection of memory and imaginary and emphasizing on the biographical component as one of the powerful impulses that underlies the creative fact and therefore the architecture production. The emotion of the memory and its projective transformation, leads some architects to express how certain early experiences are recurrent and fundamental motifs that they pursue in their trajectory, discovering to us an extraordinary creative imaginary connected consciously or unconsciously with experiences of their surroundings, or with their childhood. The experienced quotidian events can be transformed into transcendent ones, founding a nucleus from which intimal creative manifests can emerge. The students’ proposals invite us to discover a diversity of hidden imaginaries that emerge rooted in the original source of lived experience. In the exploration of memory, they discover intense space experiences, primary subjects of the architecture project. This teaching and research approach from the autobiographical experience to the creative processes reveals the extraordinary richness of a substrate of experiences that move from the individual to the collective, from the memory to the imaginary.