Classroom

Considered in simple terms of space, the classroom today is an environment that is at once obsolete, immaterial and fluid. Focusing on this neglected phase of human life that lies between childhood and university, the exhibition is dedicated to secondary education spaces.

The idea for Classroom, Architecture of Adolescence was inspired by the dire condition of a generation that had to experience the transition to adulthood during a pandemic. The experience of confinement with respect to learning was paradoxical: it transformed the students, who were forced to study from home, without really modifying their learning spaces, which remained unchanged when they returned to collective education.

Two years were enough to create a gap between needs and reality. The archaeology of adolescence was organized through the dominant tool that shaped it in the second half of the 20th century: the classroom. How were these spaces designed? How were these learning communities generated? To what cultural and social ecosystems are they subjected? What made them into political bodies? How have standardisation and transgression shaped artistic education? How does vocational education reorganize relationships between work and knowledge?

The chapters of the exhibition echo these questions: Production, Embodiment, Assembly, Transgression and Profession. Each of these chapters refers to an emblematic built example, still in use today, which represents a cluster of adolescent perspectives. Added to this diverse testimony is a material history of how classrooms have evolved.

The tangible elements that make up this narrative are of two kinds: on the one hand, the way in which architectural culture records these events and, on the other, the close connection that is established between the subjectivity of learning and the spatial realities through which learning is accomplished.