My approach to teaching connects historical methods with design-based exercises. I think of my classes as sites for experimentation and resistance. I try to promote intersectional thinking in my students by offering geographically and intellectually diverse content and setting up tasks that enable them to situate themselves within a broad and rich epistemological framework. Most of my courses are located at the intersection between architectural thinking and interdisciplinarity.
Teaching and course design.
Theory of Architecture II
This advanced course promotes a collective reflection on the future of the architecture profession, delving from scholarship which interconnects architectural work with race, class, gender and environmental studies. The course aims to provoke questions about architectural work, training, obsolescent and emerging architectural practices while constructing a case in favor of architectural imagination.
Formulation of Graduation Projects and Undergrad Thesis
This course provides students with a space to think, discuss, and define final proposals to obtain an architecture degree. Consequently, this is a course focused on defining a subject/problem that allows for the delimitation and development of a work proposal and provides students with tools to approach them.
Colloquium: Thinking and Making. (Master in Arts)
This course version aims to encourage an open exploration of the boundaries between theory and practice, and, more broadly, between the realm of thought and action.
Arch. Theory: Building, Science and Technology (Master in Architecture)
The course was structured around three intersections simultaneously addressed: -Architecture and Construction. -Architecture and Science. -Architecture and Technology.
Architectural Theory I
This course offered a possible path for exploring the theoretical territory of architecture and its implications with the objects and projects that make it explicit in spatial terms. Consequently, Theory I is dedicated to studying, rigorously and compellingly, albeit introductory, intersections between ideas and forms, between the written word and material reality—whether built or projected—and between concept and object.
Confrontations: Methods and Practices.
The course was designed with the idea of actively addressing two seemingly divergent formative dimensions: the technical-scientific and the theoretical-historical. We aimed to approach notions established in architectural education, such as the idea of analysis, specifically site analysis, as a tool supposedly derived from the scientific method and therefore associated with Cartesian thinking and spatial concepts still rooted in Newtonian physics.
Co-teaching experience with Dr. Emily Vargas.
Architecture Critic: Schools and Objects
This advanced elective aimed to revisit the construction of discourses about Costa Rican architecture. This approach was based on three main axes: schools, methods, and objects. The purpose of the course was to identify situated conflicts within the practice of architecture in Costa Rica through the analysis of issues related to institutions, like schools, and the resulting architectural objects.
History of Architecture III
The course invited students to question Architectural History’s role in future architects’ education. It sought to connect with the history of architecture in Latin America and the Global South while exploring the dominant architectural practices during the twentieth century.
Design Studio
The design workshops have actively explored the potential of hand drawing as a means to express ideas. Emphasis has been placed on working with buildings facing obsolescence, highlighting the architects’ urgent need to consistently engage with existing materials.
Natalia Solano-Meza 