The summer is almost over! Time to draw a balance on the UTRECHT SUMMER SCHOOL, «Let's Build a Beautiful City»!
I had the privilege to be invited for a 10-day tutoring in the renowned summer school organized by Ruben Hanssen and his Aesthetic City, and I can't hide that I've always wanted to participate in it as a student but never could because of overlaps with the Summer School of the Round Table of Architecture – it was in Belgium, now it has moved to France, so even further away.
Finally this year the opportunity arrived, and what an occasion! It was great news to receive an invitation I could not refuse, not because it was from Michael Corleone, but instead from Vincent Veneman (another talented traditional architecture acolyte), so I packed up from Alsace –where I was participating in the tutoring and workshop weeks for already 2 weeks– and moved to the Netherlands for those days, where the school had been taking place for one week already.
Summing up, I have learned a lot of things: some of them about architecture and urban spaces, many more about the younger generation, and I increased my skills in tutoring and teaching. It's not easy at all to calibrate an assignment according to what the students can do and can elaborate in a short time.
Knowledge needs experience, and both are cultivated with time and patience. So we planted a seed, we tried to show the way, without expecting that much. This means we had to make do with the inherent limitations of both time constraints and students' skills. Nevertheless the resulting output is very satisfying, especially if we consider the starting state. At times I experienced discomfort, discouragement, even anxiety about being able to lead the students to a coherent acceptable result.
Everything turned out fine.
It's like Sun Tzu's military theory: you have to lead the troops to “fatal ground” and burn the bridges at your back, and only then they will valiantly fight and win the battle: this applied to me as well, and in the last days I saw our students being very dedicated and concentrated in producing the required outputs for the final presentation, which was a success for them and was positively evaluated by the jury.
The jury was composed of some of the architects and professors that previously gave lectures in the school, from whom I have learned as much as I could. I like that I can learn from them and at the same time teach the youngest, because that's a foundational principle of our traditional Network and creates the milieu for future growth and collaboration.
Thanks a lot to Ruben Hanssen (the creator, very "dynamic" in the picture!), Flavio Díaz Mirón Rodríguez, Vincent Veneman, Prof. Branko Mitrović, Prof. Jonathan Weatherill, Estudio Urbano (María and Pedro Godoy), Hugh Kavanagh, SCALA Architecten (Mieke Bosse & Peter Drijver), Dominic, Joseph, Ivo and many others of the Aesthetic City.
Below you can expand this section to see a selection of pictures.
Posted: 17/08/2026 10:54 — Author(s): Riccardo Buratti