Abstract:
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Recently, my department in the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) changed its name from “Departamento de Construcciones Arquitectónicas” to “Departamento de Tecnología de la Arquitectura”. Both of these have been translated into English as the “Department of Architectural Technology”. Like most changes in the university system, replacement of the name that identifies a group led to all kinds of verbal comments among those affected, but very few, if any, were expressed in writing. Personally, I am not going to take a stance in favour of the new designation, but I can state that the former term “Construcciones Arquitectónicas” (literally, Architectural Constructions”) no longer adequately reflects what we are currently teaching and researching at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). Our university department teaches the traditional contents of materials, construction systems (building envelopes and cladding) andthe design and calculation of structures, but it also teaches the design and calculation of services (water, gas and electricity)and fittings(heating and air conditioning, lighting, sound, sanitary fittings, safety, etc.), using both active and passive systems, as well as aspects relating to the management of architecture (contracting, evaluation, supervision, logistics andmaintenance, among other aspects). This last aspect, management, is worthy of considerable attention as it fundamental to the processes of implementation, in fact to such an extent that one of my colleagues, the lecturer Dr. José Mª González, has dubbed management the “invisible technology” (Sinopoli, 2002). In short, every day, architecture is incorporating technical disciplines that are increasingly distant from what we conventionally call “construction”. Robotics, geomatics, sensor systems, nanotechnology, etc. are technical disciplines that are knocking on the door of architects on a daily basis, time and again. We can only group these disciplines epistemologically from the perspective of their applicability to architecture. |