Adaptability retrieval in artistic learning environments

Abstract

The current educational paradigm suggests a wide scope of activities with pedagogical potential held in different active learning environments, which impact student achievement. Adaptability as the physical ability of a building to cope with changing activities and requirements, is paramount when regarding artistic schools, lecturing the regular and the music and dance courses. This paper aims to present an original methodological approach on assessing the adaptability of contemporary artistic schools, as a specifc and complex case study on both the activities and spaces to consider. Its purpose is to assess the schools’ ability to cope with the pedagogical and social evolving needs and to conclude on the design attributes that potentially enhance adaptability, for a more lasting and effective building performance. It introduces procedures from different epistemological provinces, for a more supported retrieval of its adaptability, sequentially as follows: 1. Description of the spatial sample, functional and morphological, informs on how it supports activity allocation. A space syntax analysis regarding convex spaces and axial lines, as places and pathways for learning, will provide a thorough understanding of the sample’s morphology and conclude on the relevance of global and local syntactic measures towards activity allocation, spatial cognition and the overall “social logic of space” (Hillier and Hanson, 1984). 2. Description of all possible activity allocations informs on the pedagogical potential of each educational environment, matching all possible activities to the spaces in a feasibility matrix. It considers maximising entropy, informing on the uncertainty of an activity allocation to both convex spaces and axial lines (Coelho and Krüger, 2015). 3. Description of effective events informs on behaviour and appropriation, holding higher relevance in this artistic ambiance. This stage corresponds to an idiographic approach on singularities, while the latter to a nomothetic approach on regularities (Windelband, 1894). 4. Description of the potential correlations amongst each stage, enables the retrieval of the school’s adaptability, understanding a potential correspondence between integration, entropy and behaviour. This methodological framework is expected to be a contribute to knowledge advancement, identifying adaptability in this particular contemporary context and combining distinctive study felds, namely space syntax’s inputs, for its assessment. Also, for the practice, the acknowledgment of the spatial confgurations with higher representativeness towards adaptability could be informative to future designs.