Preface

Looking back on the School of Architecture’s Experiment in Joint Teaching

Every year at the beginning of the fall semester, the School of Architecture holds in Arts Education Internship. During this period, second year students throw their easels on their backs and follow the instructor to a place of magnificent scenery and begin to capture the word in their art. 2010 was a little different than usual, as we invited Professor Philippe Guérin…

… After the course, I took the opportunity to take a survey and found that the vast majority of both students and teachers felt Professor Guérin’s reaching was quite interesting, different from their usual way of doing things, and brought many opportunities for imagination and speculation. In my mind, this is the virtue of joint teaching: the coming together and communication between different cultures bring new horizons to our education content, and exposure to a new education method gives our instructors new inspiration...

... Most importantly, thanks to all the students who took part in the activity, since it was their active participation that made the fruit of this activity able to be published in this form for the enjoyments of its readers!

Gong Kai, Professor, and Vice President of the School of Architecture, SEU, 2011 march 18th

Introduction

Participating in this European contribution, to which you invited us and in which we still believe, represents a gesture of accomplishment and inner conviction which you, Chinese teachers and young students, will be able to put to good use in the future as a "breeding ground" in order to recreate links with your own culture - a culture that has unfortunately been mistreated at the end of the nineteenth and during the twentieth century. This "transplantation" will perhaps also be beneficial to us, all the more so as we will strive to achieve it with a little bit of knowledge and perfect honesty. The hybridisation of cultures has prevailed throughout history. in my opinion this fusion was the most important part of our project, and I firmly believed that we would manage to speak a common language. That common language is what allowed for dialogue and for our exchanges to be so interesting, despite the fact that our points of view on our own situations in China and Europe sometimes diverge. On the contrary, Thes différences of opinions can bring additional précisions and pertinence to our present exchanges, and maybe even help have a clear view of the issues that will drive us in the future.

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