Paths for transversal skills and orientation: signs and drawings to explore strategies for enhancing the representation of architecture

Introduction: The contribution offers some critical remarks on an orientation course entitled Signs and Drawings to explore strategies for enhancing the representation of Architecture aimed at introducing drawing as a language to potential future students of architecture. The project, part of the preparatory activities for the bachelor’s degree in Architecture, is designed to be inclusive, involving students who may not perceive themselves as adequately prepared to engage with university-level education due to the unique characteristics of their educational background. The course (20h) is structured in a series of interdisciplinary lectures and workshops, with the aim of laying the foundations of architectural language. These foundations include tools and methods, critical approaches and shared codes. The course aims to raise awareness of the meaning of signs and to facilitate the reading and production of drawings. Methodology: The course, by now delivered in two editions, involves lecturers, technicians, and research assistants from the College of Architecture and Design of the Politecnico di Torino specialized in different disciplinary fields (CEAR-08/C, CEAR-09/A, and CEAR-10/A). This approach is advantageous for students, as it offers a multifaceted learning environment. To address the diverse requirements of the participants, the instructional design involved an active learning approach, with frontal lessons being reduced in duration and complexity interspersed with discussion and practical application of the theoretical concepts introduced and concluded with flipped lesson dynamics. We based the activities on the cube as we analysed it through a variety of disciplinary approaches, encompassing its representation through signs, graphic representations, plastic modelling, haptic representations, and its design as a living space. The exercise guided participants in comprehending the intricacies of architecture and the necessity to establish a unified graphic, geometric and analytical language for effective and unambiguous architectural representation. The final satisfaction questionnaire produced insightful responses and constructive criticism Results ad conclusions: The results, limits and possible future developments of the course are outlined below. The first edition of the Signs and Drawings focused on the assimilation of drawing to the concept of visual language based on the composition of graphemes, both from the point of view of immaterial and haptic/tangible drawing. The statutes of drawing were then revealed to participants through the integration between the representational act based on the graphic approach and the representational act constituting the physical model. The results of the final questionnaire demonstrated that this integration evoked 'satisfaction' in the participants, gradually bringing them closer to the concept of inclusive, accessible, shareable architectural representation. The results of the questionnaire also enabled the formulation of new hypotheses concerning future trajectories, which included the conceptualisation of a pathway between signs and drawings. This pathway was characterised by practical experiences of implementing interdisciplinary drawing languages in the second edition.