Awakening the memory: observation, action and reflection in the teaching-learning activities of the Integrated Drawing Workshops.

In the recent experimental study: "The architect's brain and the thinking hand" [1], the differences in the affectation of the creative capacity during the design process of the students in the use of freehand drawing and CAD drawing were studied. Arriving to establish that freehand drawing causes greater cortical activity, a greater cognitive state and the production of more creative results, fixing the traced in the memory more deeply and even activating cognitive and decision processes related to emotions. With drawing -as Professor Justo Isasi would describe in his magisterial lectures "Thinking in lines" [2]- we discern, separate, mark, delimit and leave a mark, both in the surrounding space and in our own memory. These objectives are the ones that we set ourselves when defining significant teaching-learning activities that we established in the subjects of the drawing submodule of the Architecture degree, in which the four subjects of the Integrated Drawing Workshop are framed. These subjects offer the possibility of inquiring into the diffuse limits between ideation and graphic expression, fostering an integral conception of architectural creation where the student conceives graphic representation not only as a mechanism of expression and construction of space, but as one of the basic tools in the formation of the architect, which constitutes the main way in which the architect approaches reality [3]. From this integrative and transversal vision representative of the UEC model [4] in which vertical workshops and experiential activities are also established [5], some of the proposed activities have sought to rescue from memory and reinforce the knowledge of related architectural projects to widely known styles that are inserted in the training curriculum of the subjects of the composition submodule [6] (Figure 1). Other activities were proposed from the observation of the environment, such as a sensory approach in all its aspects and its conceptual and graphic expression (Figure 2). As one more of the expressions of human creation, characteristics of the language of art play an important role in the final form of the architectural work. The aesthetic value of a work of architecture is related to its evocative capacities, transmitters of a message, creators of new concepts, relations between the interior habitable space and the exterior context, between the place and the function, between the users and the built material [7]. In the current context of contemporary creation and thanks to the influence of new artistic languages and means of creation, the architectural project can be an ephemeral and audiovisual set design, a temporary urban installation, or a plan for cultural transformation and social intervention in a neighborhood. creative [8]. The transversality of artistic disciplines and genres that cultural production presents today offers us new opportunities for action and reflection, creation and research [9] that we must transfer to teaching practice to holistically enrich student training