ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book outlines the interrelations between the two fields, 'school' architecture and teaching/education, and how they mesh with other fields of knowledge, in an attempt to identify common concepts that shape the strands of pedagogic thinking and, naturally, the lines of the architectural process in the 'fields of learning'. It deals with a cohesive consideration of active-cooperative-communicative/dialogical-experiential learning in our modern societies, within a temporal framework guided less by chronological and historical than by conceptual and epistemological criteria. The book provides form and substance to spatial qualities that stem from the foregoing approach and forge the image of an 'other', different, space for learning, permuting the very term that until recently rendered this function. It focuses on the course of the concept of open space and how it has changed over time.
