Corpo, Espaço e Natureza, em Arquitectura Escolar

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on a study of the attributes of a contemporary pedagogical space, assuming it as a motor for a new society with an ecological matrix, resulting in an architecture that enhances the rediscovery of special and temporal qualities forgotten over the past decades, becoming in itself, through the perceptual and cognitive space, a learning process, based on the biodiversity of nature. Through a brief review of the historical approaches of authors such as Arnheim, Norberg-Schulz, Holahan or Gibson, a set of invariants of school architecture - hospitality, diversity and expressiveness - are analyzed (by way of reflection). These timeless spatial qualities, articulated in a setting of multiple situations, are fundamental experiences for the formation of personality and identity in the child, at this particular stage of its life. To this end, psychology (Including environmental psychology in the field of architecture), knowledge of the specificity of the body during childhood (the process of development in its: physical, motor and cognitive aspects; how the child learns/perceives the space) and ecology (as the organizing and stimulating element of a new mind set and architectural design) are seen as auxiliary inputs in the development of projects intended for childhood. The school building is seen in this study as a separate case from all other equipment, addressing the issue of the architect's schooling and training, to the extent that his/her activity is designed to embrace the whole being that the child is in its relationship with its surroundings. The concept of ecosophy applied to school architecture can combine all these factors, expressing both through the buildings and how they relate to the environment, the desire to reconcile the child with itself, with other people and with nature, in promoting balance and interconnection between built structure and environment, architecture and nature and the individual and society.