“SENSITIVITIES AND AFFECTIVITIES IN RELATIONSHIPS with the SCHOOL SPACE – Exploratory approach on young people’s dialogues and perspectives about the immateriality of spaces”.

Abstract

This study is an exploratory analysis of the discourses produced by a group of young people who participated in an investigation’s stage about the meanings of school spaces. The first part of the activity relates to the gathering of elements that reveal how students are sensitized by affective and sensory characteristics of school spaces, that is, the way they are sensitized by its intangible characteristics. To this end, the group seeks, with the help of appropriate activation mechanisms, to build experiences (affective and sensory) in direct relationship with the colors, shapes, volumes, textures and sounds of these spaces. Simultaneously the group exposes, in a joint debate, ideas, criticism, opinions, personal suggestions that arise about the reality studied aiming to build and rebuild their narratives from the experiences. It is our intention to explore the meaning and potential of what we previously named "space immateriality" or "school architectural immateriality" from the construction and deconstruction of these debates. Afterwards the group of students re-constructs, in a scale model, the school as a new reality, a reality recreated from their studies and considerations, seeking to reproduce in that model’s architectonic, this idea: the school as we would wish it to be (The School I´d Like!). Thus it’s intended to assess whether the experiences held by students correspond, as a whole, to a new positioning on the school’s architecture and physical structure and if from that positioning they acquire a new perspective on all of school’s life.Hence the work has, as its prime objective, to present a critical perspective of students about the school space, and on the involvement of those in the school environments’ architecture.