The democratization of the learning space has to start with a change in the architectural design methods, where the architect must look for his social role in parallel with his artistic or technical ones (Moniz, 2008; Bandeirinha, Allegretti, & Moniz, 2010). This paper presents the research developed with architecture students to develop their capacity of working with participatory design methods (Woolner, 2014), namely when transforming the public facilities built by the Portuguese authoritarian regime between 1926 and 1974. In facto, the Portuguese regime built a network of facilities to educate the citizens from primary schools to universities. These buildings were designed for educational plans related to important reforms in different periods of the authoritarian regime controlled by António Oliveira Salazar (1932-1969) and by Marcelo Caetano (1969-1974). Throughout these years the regime changed and the educational spaces also changed integrating new ideas and forms of pedagogical proposals and architectural movements. The first years of the regime were still very opened to modern ideas, where Dewey was quoted, but in 1939, with the Second World War, fascism became dominant and the architecture adopted a classical style and a rigid organization. The pedagogy was controlled by the “Mocidade Portuguesa”, the Portuguese paramilitary youth organization for students from 7 to 14 years old. After 1974, these schools continued to work and to educate the youth under a democratic orientation but with a learning space designed for a fascist one. What can we do to change this authoritarian paradigm into a democratic one? This is the challenge we proposed to architecture students of University of Coimbra and also to the pupils and teachers of the “Rua do Sol” Primary School, built in Porto in the 50s. To face this problem, students developed a participatory process in the Architectural Design Studio in articulation with the course of Geography and of Anthropology because the school has a strong relation with urban context and with the community around it. The students projects followed Dewey ideas looking for a learning space focused on the pupils to enable an education by experience (Dewey, 1916). These ideas are also framed by Hertzberger (2008) architectural proposal, namely the association between urban spaces and informal learning spaces as “Learning street” and “Learning Square”, where the school is like a city (Moniz & Ferreira, 2016) This paper presents the proposals for “Rua do Sol” School aiming to contribute to the design methods debate.
