Learning to Reuse Modernity: the Educational Challenge

After three decades since the founding of DOCOMOMO, education continues to be an essential matter when thinking about the future of modern heritage, but today it requires a critical reflection on the conceptual and methodological changes we need to face the present context of complexity. Modern Architecture is now crossing a paradigmatic time not only because of its inevitable degradation but because of the impact of these new scenarios that force us to rethink their conservation and reuse considering both their special constructive condition and specific functionality and the role in collective memory as recent heritage. Architectural design education must address these critical issues as a strategic content that anticipates a more appropriate practice. The conservation and the reuse of modern buildings are still out of most schools of architecture. This paper presents three different and complementary didactic experiences developed in Europe and South-America: Mindful design for updating mass housing neighbourhoods (Politecnico di Milano, Italy), Experimental re-design to integrate modern single housing to contemporary life (University of Belgrano, Argentina) and Participatory design to open up a modern school building to the neighbourhood (University of Coimbra, Portugal). They highlight the relevance of confronting the students with issues like history and memory, and their importance even for apparently ordinary buildings, not only for modern iconic monuments. The results also prove the relevance of an interdisciplinary approach and the relevance of the social dimension of conservation, because it implies to deal with the value of modernity for the memory of the community that involves keeping the values of the modernity they are inhabiting.