A 6849 Urban Design Studio I
Andrea Kahn, Coordinator; Sandro Mapillero
This studio is a laboratory for urban research. Approaching New York City as a constantly changing mix of physical conditions, abstract regulations, and unpredictable events, the studio emphasizes flexible urban configurations and interactive forms of urban knowledge. Instead of focusing on single elements or finite objects, students are asked to consider urban design as a process of negotiation between different and often conflicting forces acting in and on the city. The goal of the semester is to explore the urban design process at a range of scales including the local, regional, global and metropolitan. Projects (at times individual, at times group) raise basic urban design questions about relations between site, program, and design: How is an urban site represented? What does it mean to construct a designed understanding of site? How does this knowledge inform programming intentions? The work focuses on modes of site representation and how these influence concepts of site; site analysis methods in relation to representational techniques; and site programming strategies. Students are asked to create conceptually clear proposals by inventing critical approaches to complex urban design problems. While the studio provides opportunities to meet with representatives from both public and private agencies currently involved with sites under study, students are not expected to find solutions to pre-defined problems. Instead, they are asked to discover problems and formulate questions for themselves.
The semester begins with a short esquisse introducing a critical approach to the master-planning urban strategies associated with modernism. The next studio work concentrates on three sites in the New York City Region: one center city, one inner periphery, and one outer periphery condition. Projects are phased to address methods of site research and their influence on fundamental programming decisions (Site Construction); programming intentions as they condition design strategy and urban form-making (Urban Trans/formations); and reassessments of existing site, programming, and design strategy assumptions through the introduction of new �urban characters� operating on site (Critical Re-Programming). This studio privileges inquiry over certainty, encouraging each individual to re-assess their pre-existing design habits in an ongoing process to discover new ways to engage the challenge of city-making.
A 6836 Urban Design Seminar I
Urban Design Since 1945
Grahame Shane, Instructor.
A survey of European and American urban design since 1945, the course concentrates on the creation of the urban design discipline amidst the postwar suburbanization of America. Using the concepts of enclave and armature to examine various urban paradigms, the positive and negative aspects of present day urban codes and design conventions are discussed in the context of New York and other global city-regions. Current codes and paradigms are traced back into recent urban design theories and traditions, while examining the codes of contemporary critical practices (Phenomenological, Deconstructivist etc.). The Conclusion emphasizes a wide range of alternative approaches and the necessity of a critical position in this complex, dynamic, and interdisciplinary field. The course is structured to support A6849 Urban Design Studio I. It requires the presentation of group research on various urban paradigms. Included is a short individual mid-term paper assignment. A final � Sim City� exercise engages the previous group paradigm research in a multi-media presentation (using digital imaging skills developed in the Reading New York Urbanism Seminar).
A 4005 Urban Design Studio II
Grahame Shane; Studio Coordinator; Brian McGrath withVictoria Benatar.
The second Urban Design Studio is a large scale semester long project broken up into three phases and involving individual and group design. The sites chosen are typical of the New York �Inner Periphery." An underlying assumption is that the traditional form of the city has been thrown into question by these processes linked to the global economy. New conditions of urbanity are explored for a redundant and previously dense area of the city where new uses and new programming are urgently required. In this context urban abandonment combines with unique strategic positions in the regional transportation and communication networks. The studio critically reprograms these �Inner Periphery� sites within new regional scenarios and then moves to district plans, examining the precise impact of these scenarios. A final phase involves an architectural probe sketching the design implications of the scanario in a given local situation. Each level of the investigation is tied to a layered, analytical research of regional, district and local conditions and an examination of urban paradigms from both the center and edge of the city. Extensive use is made of the studios multi-media capabilities, which also give access to a developing data base of previous research on sites and a library of paradigms. Emphasis is on the cross-pollenization of urban morphologies from the center and from the edge in new mixed-use urban hybrids.
The studio links to various public agencies in the City and engages current debate about urban design in the city. The sequence of the semester is designed to telescope down into the site, asking a variety of different questions at various scales as they relate to the same place over time. At the district scale the studio relates closely to A6837 Urban Design Seminar II and A4714 Legislating Aesthetics, integrating information about zoning and codes, as well as studies of the urban fabric, block morphologies and housing typologies. Over the length of the semester students are expected to integrate this range of techniques (including digital imaging) in order to develop a personal working method with a critical urban design approach.
A 6837 Urban Design Seminar II
Case Studies in the Evolution of Modern Urban Fabric
Richard Plunz, Instructor (On Leave, Fall, 1995; Tony Schuman, Instructor)
This seminar examines the question of urban fabric, which is to say, the anonymous infill, usually predominantly residential, which comprises the major building volume of all cities. A basic premise of the seminar is that the anonymous fabric is at least as significant in defining the character and culture of any given city as are the monuments. For this reason, it is important that the urban designer grasps the political and tectonic devices which lead to particular fabrics in particular urban contexts. And in this regard, the culture of housing and cities is still seeking to reconcile the ethos of high modernism which has tended to emphasize the cultural universal rather than the specific place and situation. This question of the universal and the tectonic is explored through several specific case studies which are representative of modern urban fabric. Part I of the seminar focuses on the evolution of the New York City fabric through lectures given by the instructor. These emphasize the interplay between the political and tectonic forces which have shaped the texture of New York�s urbanism, with particular emphasis on housing. Part II of the seminar is organized around student presentations of case studies comparing several large cities in relation to their particular characteristic fabric types. These cities are chosen jointly with the class. Each analysis is digitally imaged for an archive which includes the studies of previous years. This exercise helps to provide the groundwork for A4006 Urban Design Studio III.
A 4006 Urban Design Studio III
Richard Plunz, Coordinator; Moji Baratloo and Michael Conard
The final Urban Design Studio represents a synthesis of the previous semesters in terms of its emphasis; from the consideration of the overall organization and structure of an urban conurbation; to the detailed design resolution of particular place within this larger hierarchy. This latter component is related more to questions of fabric than monument; and to the resolution of programmatic, spatial, and typological dysfunction based on issues of obsolescence or redevelopment. The emphasis is more on the neighborhood and on the anonymity or daily life and enterprise rather than on the unique or ceremonial. These concerns are symptomatic of cities which are in transition from an industrial-era formation to a Post-Industrial economy and reconfiguration. They represent conditions endemic to the situation of New York, and are the focus of the previous Urban Design Studio. In this last semester, however, the study moves to another world city facing similar questions, for the purpose of cross-study and comparison.
Students are expected to work in teams due to the large-sale and comprehensive character of this final project. Students are responsible for both programmatic inquiry as well as a formal spatial proposal. The project must be complete in all aspects; from a well-articulated theoretical and operational premise, to a building-scale design fragment which reflects and objectifies the overall strategy. As well, the work must be capable of engaging public discourse on several levels, including engagement with the body politic of the particular city involved.
A 6828 Urban Design Seminar III
New Urbanisms: Constructing Publics
Andrea Kahn, Instructor
This seminar examines the formation and representation of �public� spaces in the late 20th century city. It assumes that today, much of our so-called public space is not public at all. Instead of the market place, accommodating at once political, economic, domestic and social spaces at a single location, we now have marketed places of corporate-sponsored atria, developer trade-off plazas, self-taxing BID�s, even institutions like libraries and museums. Unlike their historical precedents these new public venues are primarily generated by private capital. Many result from an economic situation where global corporations and developers strive to retain control over their real-estate investments while simultaneously attempting to enhance their public image through the production of �public space�. While urban planners and economists agree that the diminishment of quality public space is a direct result of economic logics and political policies that preclude the enrichment of the public realm, designers of the physical realm still look to historically sanctioned, formal models as relevant to urban design problems today. Yet, as the universalizing construct of the public sphere as an �agora of equals� gives way to an urban reality of �multiple publics�, as the value of private space supercedes that of public places, as state financing for civic and social programs becomes more difficult to secure. Within this milieu it is time to question not only the pertinence of idealized models of public space to current urban conditions, but also the very notions of �public� and �private� upon which such models are founded. Because these notions are simultaneously philosophical, political, social and psychological, public space-making must be approached as a complex issue where diverse, and often divergent, interests converge. What is �public space�? Who is/are the �public�? The seminar is roughly divided into two parts: in the introductory weeks, students will read from a given bibliography dedicated to an interdisciplinary examination of the concepts of �public� and �private�. The aim is to provide a critical and theoretical foundation to approach the various public space constructions, and to discuss these among the class, as well as with invited guests. In the second part of the course, individual students develop bibliographies for the class reading and make related presentations on one aspect of the �Public Space� debate that particularly interests them.
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