VIRTUAL MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY

Abstract

Contemporary transformations are fundamentally shaped by our capacity to navigate, act and produce within a world defined by increasing complexity and structural uncertainty. For architecture—a discipline traditionally rooted in long-term processes—there is an urgent need to transform practices and modes of thinking. The challenge is no longer to simplify complexity, but to operate through it. This paper proposes a rethinking of architectural education through the concept of New Alliances . Drawing on complexity theory (Morin), Prigogine and Stengers’ “New Alliance,” and Buckminster Fuller’s critique of specialization, it highlights the limitations of pedagogical models based on fragmented knowledge. The analysis identifies two archetypal figures—Convergents and Divergents—emerging from a shared process of expanding practices. Convergents develop integrative forms of pedagogical hybridization aimed at regaining coherence and control, while Divergents engage in expansive hybridization, integrating uncertainty as a productive condition. These trajectories reveal a shift beyond interdisciplinarity toward hybridization understood as a transformation of knowledge, roles, and identities. The paper argues that such hybridization forms the basis for new alliances across heterogeneous domains and calls for a transformation of architectural education. Teaching architecture today means training for complexity and uncertainty, fostering systemic, adaptive and collaborative capacities through hybrid and internationally oriented pedagogical formats. In this context, the internationalization of education becomes a key dimension for developing shared, situated and comparative knowledge. Architectural education is thus reconsidered as an evolving infrastructure, capable of supporting the transition from fragmentation to systemic integration in a complex and uncertain world.