The RMB Conference 2018 will be held in Coimbra, in the frame of the Colloquium Teaching through Design that was firstly organized by the Department of Architecture and the Centre for Social Studies in 2012.

The conference will keep the same structure with four sessions – TOOLS, METHODS, INTERDISCIPLINARITY, RESEARCH – focused both on the fundaments and on the advanced issues of the design process.

Architecture education is facing new challenges due to crises of the globalization, that as strong impacts in the role of the architect today. In fact the profession in changing and demanding for other way of training the architects. This question is specially relevant for the renovation of the urban areas where the buildings produced in the 20th century are waiting for strategic interventions – to be repaired, to be renewed, to be reconstructed or to be demolish.

The architect needs new tools because drawing is not enough to understand the building nor the people who lives there. The methodologies are more complex because they have to integrate not only the technical dimension but also the social one. These inclusive approach demands for a dialogue with other disciplines. Considering these three topics, architecture classroom is becoming more lab than a workshop, where research explores new tools and methods, testing their hypothesis namely in the design studios.

The conference is part of the Erasmus Plus Project, Re-use of modernist buildings, coordinated by Detmold University

This conference will be articulated with a students workshop.