One of the great contemporary challenges for FAU is the articulation between their professional contents, that integrates since its founding as a standalone unit, tuned with the major lines of production and dissemination of knowledge determined to USP as a whole.
In the reforms of 1962 and 1968 , which defined the curricular structure of FAU based on a multidisciplinary vision of architecture and urbanism, the relationship between content occurred schematic and respectively in two planes. First, at the convergence between knowledge of humanities, arts and techniques for the formation of a professional who is not only a humanist, an artist or a technologist, a little of three simultaneously.Second, the incorporation of content related to architecture and urbanism, specially industrial design, visual communication and landscaping, widening the spectrum of scale and design practices from a regional / environmental system to the isolated object and its components. The architect professional undergraduated from this range of approaches is enabled to reply the needs of the development process from the direct satisfaction of needs of social reproduction - in housing projects, urban systems and others - as on the economic production of property and services for which their skills are required.
This broad and multifaceted training of the professional and intellectual architect, however, does not automatically unfolds in recognized forms of production in academic forums, internal and external to the University. In the academic trajectory of the teachers at FAU the history points to a trend to greater recognition and titling of those who, architects or not, have been devoted to the analysis and criticism of architecture and urban design or related practices, than those who have done the activity project at any scale, the axis of its contribution at the College. This is a difficult problem to solve because on the one hand, there cannot be an architects training college in which specific knowledge of the synthesis, design, creation, that are systematically put aside in the academic evaluation and, secondly, it cannot be attributed to the current professional activity - however creative it is - scientific merit that it does not have.
The way that FAU searches to respond today to this challenge is through the relationship between academic purposes in the context of issues of large social concern that pervade the research, undergraduate education, pos graduate and college extension activity, including professional practice of social and academic recognition. Challenges such as social housing, the interaction between city, landscape and environment, preservation and restoration of built heritage, among others, constitute the object of so much convergence between the humanities, arts and technology, that structure FAU departments, and as between the academic purposes of education, of undergraduate and postgraduate, of research and of culture and university extension. It is to promote the connections between the major academic purposes - as a means to overcome the barriers that artificially separate "professional" and "academic" contributions - that the educational systems, research and culture and extension at FAU have been restructured towards to complement each other around programs and common actions.
Teaching, in this way, comes up not as a closed and targeted purpose in the level of undergraduate and pos-graduate, but as an axis of convergence between knowledge production and research and the innovative applications in the university extension. It is in this context that falls within, at the undergraduate, the formation of a new inter-unit course focusing on industrial design and graphic design, and the experience of dual training with Civil Engineering, in partnership with the Polytechnique College. It is still in this context that the concentration areas of pos-graduate diversify, in order to allow more transit within research and with various contents of Graduation, deserving - just like the Pos-graduation - a frank and systematic access to new knowledge generated.
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