Imaginaries as Relevant Knowledge in the Process of Teaching Architecture: The Case of Ecotourism

Abstract

Incorporating the issue of imaginaries into architecture education has the goal of aiding the development of students’ creative thinking skills. This article proposes that a reading of tourism imaginaries in a project workshop during the design stage sparks a nonlinear creative process that provides information on the sociocultural context and speaks to the determining factors of tourism practices (both individual and collective), which allows us to create comprehensive, holistic designs focused on the user-group-context. In accordance with Irma Cantú, creativity in the design process can be encouraged by strategies that help unblock and foster its development. In this sense, reading, particularly on related subjects, encourages the use of metaphors and analogies, which form the basis of a theoretical construction of the architectonic concept.

The anthropological nature of the imaginary serves as an epistemological tool, allowing us to approach any complex social phenomenon, thus revealing its different levels of expression and showing us part of its history and its relationship with the natural and social context in which it occurs. As including the environmental dimension (formulated more as a choice, as an imperative) has become a necessity in higher education over the last thirty years through educational models oriented towards sustainable development, we feel that a review of the imaginary of ecotourism, via a description of its ideology, makes it possible to contribute to the environmentalization of the university curriculum in degrees such as architecture. Finally, from the perspective of architectonic design, we propose that the structural complexity of an imaginary, as the mental representation of the beliefs and ways of life of a human group, can be useful for understanding the user and the relationships of habituality that they establish in a specific context.