On Saturday, 16 November 2013, the ESARQ School of Architecture opened its doors to professors, families and current and future students to allow them to see what ESARQ students in every year of the programme have been working on during the first few months of the academic year.
The open house is the first of two such events planned for this academic year. Some 100 people visited the faculty and entered its classrooms to get to know firsthand what students are doing in specific projects and in areas such as cooperation, accessibility, ceramic studies and urbanism. Participants viewed audiovisual presentations of composition projects and visited the ESARQ facilities, including the scale-model workshop.
The open house began with a brief presentation by Pere Vall, the director of the ESARQ. Vall talked about the Faculty's educational method, which is based on project work at all levels. This approach produces competitive professionals with versatile skill sets who are entrepreneurial, innovative, committed and capable of developing quality designs for complex projects and processes.
Next, Cristina Planas called attention to the statistics produced by the ESARQ's teaching method: the high employment rate (94% according to the Catalan University Quality Assurance Agency), the existence of two University Business Chairs, the Erasmus Mundus Master Course label on the Master’s Programme in International Cooperation, and the awards UIC students recently won for the first time in the latest edition of the Spanish Architecture Biennial.
The ESARQ's next open house this academic year will take place on Saturday, 5 April 2013, when students will once again be in the process of submitting projects that will provide visitors with a comprehensive view of what it means to study architecture at the ESARQ.
