VIRTUAL MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY

Abstract

Architecture and interior design studios have traditionally served as critical pedagogical sites for cultivating creative thinking, spatial reasoning, and professional identity. Contemporary design education is undergoing a significant transformation in response to global disruptions, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of artificial intelligence, increasing student diversity, and sustained calls for decolonised, ethical, and sustainable curricula. Within this context, this paper foregrounds teaching creativity and creative teaching as central to studio pedagogy, with particular emphasis on adaptive reuse and “ruins competitions” as experimental modes of learning. The paper argues that creativity can be taught and structured through pedagogical strategies. It examines architecture and interior design studios, focusing on adaptive reuse pedagogy and design competitions that engage students with culturally embedded sites. Building on Schön’s reflective practice framework and subsequent scholarship, the paper views teaching as a creative act that involves curating learning environments, facilitating dialogue, and designing briefs informed by real-world conditions. Competition-based reuse studios foster iterative design, ethical reflection, and sensitivity to sustainability and cultural memory. New tools such as generative AI and BIM serve as creative collaborators to enhance visualisation, simulation, and decision-making, but their use requires critical interpretation. Within debates on teaching, research, participation, and sustainability in higher education, the paper argues that ruins-based reuse competitions offer a powerful pedagogical approach to fostering creativity in architecture and interior design. By making creativity both the subject and method of teaching, the study offers a framework for reimagining studios in a changing educational and professional landscape.