ANTI-DISCIPLINARY INTERDISCIPLINARITY: Uselessness in a Polytechnic Architecture School

The aim of this chapter is to draw the contours of an ‘anti-disciplinary interdisciplinarity’ at odds with the logic of utility and the solutionism proper to architectural teaching and learning in technocratic, polytechnic pedagogical environments. To this end, the chapter will consider the potential and difficulties of such an orientation within the specific institutional setting of a polytechnic school in Italy, starting from the pedagogical experience of an MSc design studio, which over the last four years has revolved around the notion of ‘uselessness.' Following a brief introduction, the chapter comprises three sections: the first describes the organization of what we have called elsewhere ‘a pedagogy of uselessness’; the second contextualizes such a disposition in teaching and learning within the interdisciplinary disciplinarity of polytechnic institutions; and the third further taps into the organization of the design studio to argue for an ambivalent anti-disciplinary interdisciplinarity which is part of the disciplinary field of architecture yet problematizes its canonical premise, method, and outcome.