URBAN DESIGN STUDIO I: SUMMER -1996

The summer urban design studio began with investigations to locate active site forces and to reveal how these shape existing site conditions. This work of SITE CONSTRUCTION produced two types of design-oriented information: a critical understanding of existing urban conditions and orders, and strategies for introducing and/or accommodating other conditions and orders. Working in small groups, students exposed inter-relationships and spatial arrays characterizing their study area. Unlike conventional site analysis, the site research and its subsequent site representations were not assumed to be objective or comprehensive. Rather, the Site Construction work initiated the first urban design action: drafting specific site boundaries based on a critical understanding of the general study area.
Each area --Manhattan's West Side Waterfront, Downtown Brooklyn, and the Bethpage Industrial Park -- was considered by two student groups, each of whom produced their own designed understanding of the site, or Site Construction. Within groups, students identified topics of individual interest to focus their group's effort at thematizing site conditions hierarchically. While each group defined site issues and determined site boundaries according to their constructed interpretation of the general study areas, all three groups approached their study areas at multiple scales (regional, metropolitan, local, global). The Site Construction thus situated the urban study areas in a larger context of infrastructural linkages, networks and systems, while also placing emphasis on the discovery and description of their physical character and specific spatial aspects.

SITE CONSTRUCTION

	MANHATTAN WESTSIDE The Urban Waterfront
	DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN The Satellite City
	BETHPAGE, LONG ISLAND The Low Density City