INTRODUCTION

The Urban Design Program introduces a way of thinking about the city which is more complex and inclusive than architectural design, yet more form oriented than the discipline of urban planning. The course work explores that ill-defined realm between architecture and planning, as well as such areas as cultural theory, sociology, urban geography, economics, and real estate. The base endeavor, however, is architectural design, which serves as a catalyst for incorporation of wide-ranging perspectives from other disciplines. In this sense, the program is considered experimental, exploratory, and unorthodox in comparison to the established canons of the traditional architectural design studio. The faulty are committed to the architectural investigation of urban phenomena at all scales.

Central to the urban design curriculum is the coordinated three-semester studio/seminar sequence. This material engages the state of the late twentieth-century urbanism, especially those cities which have come of age in the modern industrial era and now face the transition to new forms and meanings. A dialogue is woven between New York City, which is the primary focus of the program; and other world capitals with analogous contemporary conditions. It also moves between the recent theoretical debate on future urbanism, and applied projects which directly engage the realities of the transformation of the post-industrial city. In this way, the program attempts to engage both the daily reality of our urban condition and the theoretical abstraction of current academic debate; not one to the exclusion of the other.

The material of the first semester studio represents an introduction to the morphology of New York, from center to inner periphery, to edge city. The first semester seminar provides an overview of the contemporary literature on the question of urbanism. The second semester studio is focused in detail on the singular issue of rebuilding the inner periphery in New York. Its seminar investigates the question of the anonymous urban fabric with comparative study of New York and other world cities. The topic of the third semester studio moves to another city for comparative purposes and is engaged with the issue of restructuring and rebuilding the nineteenth and early twentieth century fabric. The seminar continues to explore recent theoretical debate, focused on the problematic of public space. The Urban Design Program embraces a special relationship between the design studio and New York City through collaboration with city agencies and other public interest constituencies. This collaboration interjects a heightened degree of reality and immediacy within the academic program; and in return it gives public institutions a valuable resource in the city. Included among the agencies are the Battery Park City Authority, New York City Housing Authority, New York City Department of City Planning, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and the New York Regional Plan Association.

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