Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Learning Environment Design

The lecture begins with a brief presentation of Pirjo Sanaksenaho’s building design studios on school design at Aalto University, highlighting their approach to integrating educational concepts into architectural thinking.

It then moves on to a broader discussion of the relationship between pedagogy and spatial design, and concludes with several examples of recent Finnish school architecture that illustrate these principles in practice.

Speaker: Pirjo Sanaksenaho, DSc, Associate Professor of Public Building Design at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture.

Pirjo Sanaksenaho, DSc, Associate Professor of Public Building Design at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, has taught several studio courses on school design for master’s students of architecture and led a research project on multidisciplinary perspectives on learning environment design. Before joining academia, she was a practicing architect at Sanaksenaho Architects designing award-winning buildings in Finland and China, like St Henry’s Ecumenical Art Chapel and Villa CIPEA in Nanjing.

Sanaksenaho has published articles in professional and scientific journals and has served on the editorial board of the Nordic Journal of Architectural Research. Her lecture explores how recent curriculum renewal in Finland has influenced the development of school architecture, with particular attention to how learning environments are designed to support the development of transversal competences.

Coordinator: Maria Fianchini

Contact: maria.fianchini@polimi.it