The social housing and sustainable design: a teaching experience

The concepts of design that must be attended, especially in developing countries, are social and cultural concerns, as well as questions of environmental comfort and sustainability.The aspects of building constructions economicand technological viability and function also have continual importance. Contemporary architecture and its urban setting have exerted specific pressures on the design process, and this in turn on formal educationof professionals. Design education has however on the whole not found appropriate models to attend to the complexity of all these questions. In Brazil, as well, most schools adopt a formalistic approach to design. This paper describes a design class of the University of Campinas, Brazil, where the traditional paradigms were questioned and where urban design was the driving force of addressing sustainability in the built environmentin a social interest context.