Pedagogy 2025
Abstract
This research investigates the architectural design studio pedagogy and in particular, the assignments that consider archival research before conducting adaptive reuse. In the wider realm of its framing as a sustainable design strategy, its treatment often remains superficial, focusing on technical retrofitting or environmental efficiency. Accordingly, this research situates adaptive reuse within broader debates, arguing to rethink its archival engagement as key in the construction of an argument for designing with the preexisting built environment. During a one-month design workshop conducted at the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou in September 2025, students were asked to define the existing building status through critical engagement with construction records and planning documents available on archives. By foregrounding these sources, pedagogy encouraged students to set the existing status of buildings not in their current object-neutral appearance but rather as layered historical constructs shaped by different architectural operations in time. The class not only debated which histories were privileged, but also reflected on how setting different historical and material departure points for design could rethink contested memories while affecting the actual studio outcome. While the potential effects of this in design education are yet unclear, this research poses the question of how critical approaches to archival inquiry reframe adaptive reuse from a narrow technical problem into a critical cultural practice. Ultimately, it proposes the design studio as a place where transformation of the built environment does not necessarily depart from the present, but by recognizing its most pedagogically-valuable past moments in history.
Tomás Rodríguez is an architect and Phd researcher currently conducting research about amateur architectural archives and the informal management of architectural documentation. He has been a visiting researcher at Manchester School of Architecture (2024) and the Jencks Foundation at the Cosmic House in London (2025). He has lectured and taught in different schools of architecture and design. He currently teaches in the Architecture Department at Madrid´s School of Architecture.
Luis Rojo de Castro graduated from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid in 1987, where has been teaching design since 1992. He is currently Tenure Professor at the Architecture Department, teaching design studios at the undergraduate and graduate programs, as well as Labs and Workshops at the Master’s for Advanced Architecture. He obtained a Master’s degree at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University in 1989, and a Ph.D. in Architecture from the Polytechnic University of Madrid . Luis Rojo was co-editor of the journal CIRCO Coop and is currently the director of CPA, Cuadernos de Proyectos Arquitectónicos, an academic journal oriented towards disciplinary research, published together with the Architecture Department at the ETSAM. Luis Rojo has been a Visiting Critic of Architecture at the Harvard School of Design and Visiting Professor of History and Architecture Theory at the Escuela de Arquitectura de Navarra. In 2016 was appointed Visiting Professor of Architecture at the City College of New York for the Fall semester, and in 2019, Visiting Professor of Architecture at the China Academy of Art, in Hangzhou. As a result of his academic and research practice, his writings on contemporary architecture have been published in A+U, El Croquis, Cassabella, Tectónica, Revista Arquitectura, CIRCO, Rassegna, Detail, Space, On Diseño, El País journal, etc.