It is difficult to ignore the accelerating growth of planetary urbanization, supported by profound changes in the world economics. The rapid development of urbanization places a huge strain on nowadays architects and urban planners to build not only comfortable and solid but also environment and human-friendly urban environments, able to respond to increasingly changing needs. This simple assumption makes the relevance for one privileged discourse around architecture irrelevant and unfruitful. By contrast, I believe one design’s role is to best challenge the transformations happening on our times, by questioning even the simplest matters around us and formulating consequently social and spatial answers with architectural means. To this end, I believe architecture must be conceived as both a research and design activity, a conviction that infuses my professional practice and my investigation into the complex connections between human agency and external driving forces in architectural and urban design.

I see my one role as helping students understanding this issue, training them with both conceptual tools and practical skills that can make their work as architects more informed, innovative and responsible. Despite the seemingly huge disparity in the types of learning that these aspects of architecture require, I believe that as a teacher I can help students see their mutual influence, and thus gain a fuller understanding than just knowing either aspect alone.
During my class time, I use my own research and practice to introduce students to diverse means by which the boundaries of architectural design can be actively challenged to lead toward innovative design response. Indeed, I do not see design as a merely problem-solving operation, which works within a given paradigm. My aim is to teach students on how to challenge conventional assumptions through a continuous research activity that investigating outside disciplinary boundaries leads to the discovery of opportunities that can be exploited and transformed into design innovation. Investigating changes and opportunities in particular and specific context is a research activity which, operating inductively from the ground up, allows to retrieve broader conclusions from specific and local data. It is part of my job as a teacher to make this process evident and to instill its value and utility. To this end, my teaching and practice tread the line between architecture and several other fields, including urban studies, urban design, geography, ecology, technology and sociology.

I was first able to test this approach to teaching at Polytechnic University of Turin, where together with other colleagues, I developed an international design studio which, starting from the investigation of several contexts of action, focuses on singularity, diversity and bottom-up assemblage instead of top-down, ready-made architectural and planning solutions. This approach seeks to reveal to students the complexity of the urban realm in a global context and let them explore ways of addressing broader socio-spatial restructurings by the mean of design activities.

My teaching activity in the classroom seeks to accomplish these goals through several learning methods: lectures, demonstrations/workshops, on field analysis and individual critiques. Being able to demonstrate how analytical techniques can be applied and how design process works is essential to helping students develop their own interest and knowledge in a productive way. While individual critiques and mid-terms review based on representational virtuosity and instilled competition have been one of the core teaching methods in studio-based courses, in my classes I seek to maintain a delicate balance of encouragement and constructive criticism that recognizes and responds to the strengths and weaknesses of each student. Working with international students with different cultural and social backgrounds, I encourage an approach to design development and evaluation that is more inclusive for those students with broader interests, as social agendas, research interests and cultural specificities.
Moreover, drawing on my research in architecture of emerging countries, before Asia and more recently Latin America, my pedagogical approach decenters privileged perspectives and offers students ways to think beyond their own social, economic and cultural norms. For instance, in my studios, I make an active effort to include design references and reading lists of architectural voices that are culturally distant and that are usually under- or mis-represented in the architecture discourse. I have also begun to integrate more explicitly components of ‘otherness’ into my recent courses at the University of Monterrey, in which I invite students to explicitly include in their design perspectives outside their owns, such as agents of different species, cultures and social areas.

Finally, I believe that design as a social practice can have a performative role in our society. Thus, after learning the basic skills needed to carry out their own work, I invite students to think broadly about the effects of their design choices in the real world. This enhances a full understanding of the responsibility architects have in terms of generating a more sustainable and inclusive society and how this can be achieved through the means of design.