The “Adapt, Overcome, Digitize” exhibit at the UPT Library

The Botanical Park, as seen by the students from the Faculty of Architecture and City Planning

The main lobby of the UPT Library hosted Friday, on March 25, 2022, the “Adapt, Overcome, Digitize” exhibit that displays projects by Politehnica University Timisoara architecture students, representing their visions for the botanical park, in three ways: a botanical greenhouse, a playground, and a tower.

At the opening event, the teaching staff and students from the Faculty of Architecture and City Planning were joined by UPT rector, assoc. prof. dr. eng. Florin Drăgan, who reflected on the displayed projects and the involvement of the entire community in a series of projects targeting a redesign of the UPT campus as a whole.

Two years ago, at the beginning of March, the Faculty of Architecture and City Planning was hosting the opening of its semester exhibition. That same day, Romania was also facing the start of the pandemic, alongside the university and its projects. Part of the works that were showed at that time for only a few hours had remained in the library lobby, while others were returned home in the faculty archives.

Two years later, in the same space, a new exhibition was organized and dedicated to the changes the pandemic brought to teaching first-year students at the Faculty of Architecture. The “Adapt, Overcome, Digitize” exhibition puts into the spotlight the results of a new methodology of training first-year students, a methodology that was awarded the “Ioan de Sabata” award in late 2021. The modules proposed to the 2020-2021 generation of students, connected with various support courses with digital tools for first-year students, in national premiere, highlighted a new, project-based learning methodology that was later officially incorporated into the syllabus of the Faculty of Architecture and City Planning within Politehnica University Timișoara.

The UPT Library exhibit brings together the projects that were left from the March 2020 event – models of the city of Tetrapolis and the results of digitization during the pandemic – the projects of the first-year students regarding the Botanical Park. A new design workshop was created from the fusion of the two working methods, employing both manual and digital methods with support subjects integrated with the activities and objectives of the projects, guided by the ambition and desire for progress of a team that has been working together for more than a decade.

The exhibition is open to public for three weeks and was organized through the first payment of the “Ioan de Sabata” award.