Architecture is a specialist discipline and essentially a collective event. It confidently asserts its function to serve society and draws its energy and its inventiveness from the positive constraints imposed by this society and by its own material and spiritual characteristics.

Learning is not restricted to the mere accumulation of knowledge. Know-how and critical thinking are paramount, focused on an essential ethical dimension, with the aim of guiding students towards responsible and competent life skills.

To meet this requirement, discipline, creativity and technical know-how are, in their complementarity and indivisibility, the primary objectives of the training of our students.

In addition to fostering creativity, the ability to manipulate concepts and the ability to act independently and collaboratively, the course strengthens the acquisition of dual skill-sets:

• to build and develop, that is to say, to ground theory in reality;
• to adopt a forward-looking approach, which may lead to research.

Students benefit from an approach which encompasses all the aspects of the architectural discipline: artistic, intellectual, scientific and material.

Teaching is based on convictions, situating architecture within the social context, based on the particular conditions of individual and communal living. In this way, architecture is a specialist discipline and essentially a collective event. It confidently asserts its function to serve society and draws its energy and its inventiveness from the positive constraints imposed by this society and by its own material and spiritual characteristics.

The approach adopted aims to be critical and non-doctrinal, ensuring a simplicity of viewpoints leading to the transformation of a place, at every level, giving meaning from the perspective of accommodating different ways of living.

Architecture is also a profession that requires solid working expertise based on knowledge, critical thinking and know-how.

Teaching revolves both around the architectural project and theory classes and builds on the skills developed by the different partners. It aims to "enable" students to develop a critical attitude and to feed their intuition in order to address the architectural issue as broadly as possible.

Teaching also draws on certain unique elements relating to the location of the site in Tournai and its cross-border and inter-regional situation, connecting Wallonia, Flanders and France in a network, to form a cross-border metropolis.