I. Introduction.
The Factory of the World

The world is a made-world.

Just look around and you’ll notice that we inhabit a world in which everything has been produced by humans. Our houses, cars, clothes, food... all belong to that category of objects whose appearance in the world is determined by human action, the result of industrial processes also designed, produced, and managed by humans. Even what has not been made by our technology today appears as administered or governed. National parks, those spaces intended to perpetuate what is given – that which appeared in the world before human action encompassed everything – would be impossible without human administration. And like them, any phenomenon belonging to that other category we call natural. The air we breathe, the water in the seas, or the wildest jungles, all are observed, analyzed, and managed daily. Our influence and our doing now extend beyond the homosphere.

At the same time, this production of the made-world is – still – dependent on a broad yet specialized group of humans trained in the management and administration of everything that today appears as 'made.' Engineers, designers, workers, managers – the amalgamation of disciplines and practices dedicated to producing what we now perceive as real is vast. All of them are involved in making tangible – real – each and every one of the objects that form the made-world. However varied the execution of these practices might seem, all converge on the same point: action. All resolve into something made, into the doing that leads to that something. Whether it’s the manufacture of a washing machine, the harvesting of crops, the electrical installation in a car repair shop, the operation of the lathe in that same shop, the bookkeeping of a small business, or the decoration of the shop window where its goods are sold… All the practices that culminate in the appearance of the countless objects that constitute reality are forms of doing. Modes of action. Hence, it is no surprise that this production of production, as Marx would define it, is precisely rooted in action, in doing.

But like everything created, the made-world faces not only the problem of producing what is made, but also that of its durability. That is, in addition to the ontological problem of its production (the Platonic appearance), it faces the metaphysical and, above all, material problem of its maintenance. So much so that many of the practices mentioned above are dedicated to the preservation – functional, but not exclusively – of what has been made, of what has been produced. As will be seen, this has profound implications for the aesthetic proposal of this project.

II. Background.
The Factory of the World’s Factory.

Today, the primary pedagogical methodology in almost all, if not all, educational institutions worldwide is known as learning by doing. Derived from Dewey's exaltation of the everyday, the last great attempt to strip any transcendental attribute from both our access to reality and reality itself by focusing on the analysis of the day-to-day, something that would have immense consequences both for the production of this everyday life and for its appreciation.

But let us focus on the first aspect, the production of day-to-day life. Of the reality we live. The most relevant aspect of this methodology is that it reveres the effect, what is produced, while the causes, both the practices that must be carried out for the production of that effect and the material elements of that production, the raw materials, are always subsumed into that effect. The impact on reality takes precedence over everything else. Ultimately, you learn to produce – and here, to produce means the appearance of something in reality, if not reality itself. What is to be learned is always subordinated to the desired product. And it is based on that produced, the effect of the learning process, how that process is evaluated. It is an extraordinarily teleological methodology, if one allows this metaphysical concept to be transferred to pedagogical fields.

The ends are important, the means are subordinated.

This methodology – and its multiple applications and variations – is so widespread that it has been transferred to all areas of the production of reality, that is, it applies both to education and to work. Today, studying is almost the same as working, with the focus placed on the effect, what is produced. It could be said that this coincidence defines a unique moment in history, perhaps never before has it happened. That study and work are governed by the same method is a great novelty. Until now, learning was based on acquiring the best means – refining techniques – to achieve predefined goals; today, that refinement has become history, with only the achieved effect being important and, in the best case, how the student-worker adapts and contributes to the production process. And this is due, surely there are many other factors at play, but here we want to highlight this: the position that subjectivity occupies in both processes, educational and labor.

And so, to be very quick and to summarize greatly, subjectivity has been subjugated in the educational-labor process, if not eradicated. The self of the worker-student disappears, diluted in the process, and the more it does, the better. The self has disappeared from the production process of reality – no wonder we tend to describe that produced reality we inhabit as ‘impersonal’ – in favor of the team and the process itself. In fact, the evaluation criteria, both professional and labor, are the quality of the effect produced and the integration of the subject in the production process. Something that, on the other hand, is nothing but the culmination – for now – of the productive trend started by Fordism almost a century ago. Something that highlights the growing search for the meaning of work, an increasingly urgent search, as shown in Graeber's anthropological works or the growing offering of products from the consulting industry focused on defining the meaning of jobs, companies, projects, etc.

In this paradigm, the better the student-worker, the less they appear as indistinguishable from the process and its effect.

(Quick note, Dewey never intended for the disappearance of the subject, quite the opposite. Dewey understood the everyday as the sum of individual actions and not of productive processes, which is why his educational proposal had an immediate aesthetic application; Dewey, as is well known, was never too much of a structural thinker.)

III. Context.
The Other in the Factory of the World

And so, by learning to do, subordinating learning and professional performance to the realization of the effect, we have come to inhabit a world-made. This, on the other hand, is a historical achievement of the productive system and work-study methodologies: never before have we inhabited environments entirely produced, sustained, and managed by humans on the same scale as we do today. An example: let's think of the desert, those ultimate frontiers that empires collided with and were never able to tame. Romans, Persians, English… their civilizational aspirations always perished, buried in the dunes. Their cities, their civil constructions, their settlements always adhered to the periphery of those seas of sand, unable to endure beyond the first dunes and for a long time. Until today. Cities like Dubai or Doha were unthinkable just a century ago and, if they bear the added cost of maintenance and assuming the state of the world continues as it is today – a more or less unlikely condition, things as they are – they will still be there within another.

This massive success of the industrial production system of reality has a material cost, of course, but not only that: the cost goes beyond the economic or environmental, the impact has also been social. It is not here to point out the already much-discussed social problems generated by the neoliberal policies of the last half-century (let’s recall here that old ‘There is no society, there is only the individual’ from Thatcher), but rather to try to go beyond those harmful social effects and focus on their effects on subjectivity.

As we have seen in other texts, subjectivity – that discovery of understanding and self-expression about how we recognize ourselves as what we are and to others, which modernity bequeathed to us – is a fundamental concept for understanding and analyzing the historical development of architecture and design. Well then, what happens with subjectivity in the factory of the world-made, in the sum of industrial production processes that generate the reality as we perceive and inhabit it today? As we have already pointed out, it becomes subordinated to those processes. Normative subjectivity is the one that assimilates to the process. What does this mean? It practically negates the concept of subjectivity. Why? Well, this has already been pointed out: because it appears as a continuation of the production process and not as self-expression. And, without that expression or, to be less radical, with that expression diminished, it is impossible to recognize oneself. And, without recognition of oneself, there is no recognition of the other. Therefore, any 'us' is impossible.

It is fair to recognize here that this erosion is not only the effect of the evolution of industrial processes of reality production; it is also the effect of that destruction of the social pointed out by neoliberalism.

And in this environment of a crisis of subjectivity is where Cotes Baixes appears, with its recognition of the problem and its proposed solution. This is, from this point of view, the greatness of this learning center: understanding that this learning-by-doing is not enough and that its problems can only be solved from the community. The subject, productive or not, is not an independent, solipsistic entity, whose existence is alien to others. Its existence is closely linked to the existence of others. Without the other, there is no one, this is the greatness of their approach. A recovery of intersubjectivity – the concept that expresses that self-recognition, subjectivity, also depends on the recognition one makes of others and that others make of oneself – which seeks to overcome Dewey's limitations through a communitarian approach like MacIntyre’s. Or, in other words, recognizing that the subject and its manifestation also have structural, social dependencies.

Thus, Cotes Baixes points to a solution to the teleological nature of the learning-by-doing method, adding social and community values to the equation. The goal is no longer just the effect, what is produced and its production process, but also its impact and relationship with the community.

IV. Concept
The Aesthetics of the Factory of the World

And this is the spirit that defines Venture Experience's intervention in Cotes Baixas. And, at the same time, it manifests the triple conceptual difficulty of this intervention. A proposal that seeks – and this is the first difficulty – to make that pedagogical model tangible in physical, architectural elements, where subjectivity is subsumed into the production process without renouncing – and this is the second – the idea of community and its construction and promotion. To understand these first two difficulties, it is worth remembering that these two theories, Dewey’s experiential and MacIntyre’s communitarian, are often understood as antagonistic, precisely because one focuses on subjectivity, where the subject of experience is one, autonomous and independent, while the other focuses on intersubjectivity, where the interaction, the exchange between different subjectivities living together in a given space, generates personal subjectivity for that moment and space. Resolving these antinomies was essential for the success of the project.

But that's not all. All of this – and this is the third difficulty, derived not so much from the pedagogical process or its communitarian ambition, but from the very nature of the world-made, a world where everything appears as given and, yet, is already manufactured – doing so from what has already been built previously, taking advantage of available materials and spaces to redesign (re-signify) them and give them new readings conducive to generating renewed experiences. Or, in theoretical terms, how to combine the experience found in Dewey’s pedagogy with the social and community aspects embraced by MacIntyre, while at the same time not renouncing the already existing physical elements.

In summary, to transform the space to transform the educational community to – someday, hopefully not too distant – transform the world.

How has this been achieved? Perhaps following the path marked by this triple difficulty will contribute to a better understanding. Or, at least, to an orderly exposition of the solutions.

Let’s start with the methodological process. The entire intervention is focused on deepening the relationships between two processes: the subjective immersion of the participant in the educational community and the industrial production process of reality, so that the pedagogical project is strengthened. Thus, for example, the redesign of the area designated for teachers undergoes a radical change aimed at materializing this pedagogical method not only inside the classroom but also in the spaces where what will take place in the classroom is prepared beforehand. The same concept can be experienced in the cafeteria and other common spaces for students. In short, the aim was to radicalize the pedagogical method by extending it to both before and after the actual educational event.

But at the same time, and this leads us to the more communitarian side of the proposal, these actions have been accompanied by others aimed at breaking down walls, both physical and mental, with the goal of constructing and settling the community, as a first step toward recognizing the community as a fundamental factor of the pedagogical method. Perhaps its best materialization is the conversion of the outdoor garden into a polyvalent experiential space, with uses ranging from classrooms to spaces for socialization or concentration and introspection. An open space that also houses Cotes Baixes' three major community projects: the sustainable house, the garden, and the reading promotion center. In this way, the common doing becomes the main tool for establishing the communitarian foundation by proposing the transaction between subjectivities for the promotion of intersubjectivity.

And finally, all of this has been carried out from what could be called the aesthetics of legacy – understood here as legacy in computing terms, that is, previous developments that condition future developments. Knowing that we inhabit a world-made and, therefore, from the respect for what has already been made, Venture has proposed a set of actions aimed at generating new readings of the already existing spaces through re-signification actions ranging from redefining the uses of those spaces to technological solutions that accompany the student or their teacher throughout their daily life. But, and this also reflects the aforementioned understanding of the world, these actions have not been resolved in the manner of a collage or postmodern hodgepodge, that eclectic accumulation of cultural and historical references pointing to a world outside history (when we still thought we lived in that Hegelian end of history, and thus could maintain a playful and irresponsible attitude toward it), but from the appreciation of the legacy that already pre-exists in Cotes Baixes. Thus, digital information panels are combined with new spatial uses to generate a different and distinctive user experience, not only focused on inserting the student-subject into industrial production processes in reality but also on regenerating a social fabric capable of understanding the importance of the community – efficiency, sustainability, society – in the final result of that process of reality creation.