The Course Goals:
The aim of this studio-based course is to give an introduction to urban planning and design strategies, introducing and investigating a series of forms in which they are materialized in the built environment. The students will be trained in thinking of urban form with a series of different foci investigating on the one hand how architectural concepts behave in the urban scale, and on the other, the complexity brought into the design process when acting in urban planning and design contexts. The course will also give insight in different media of investigation and presentation, hereby training and improving the use and understanding of a set of tools used in the design process, and in the process of translation between ideas, analyses, proposals, and projects. Seen through these different textures, the course will introduce participants into the social, cultural and political implications of urban transformation as well as provide training in analyzing, describing and responding to urban spaces as a materialized textures.
Course main content
The studio-based course will give the participants insight into design strategies and processes for urban transformation. The main focus of the course is to introduce and critically discuss urban textures and how aspects of architectural design act in the scale and context of urban planning and design. This will be done through (1) focused workshops on a chosen aspect to go in-depth into its properties and conditions, (2) theoretical lectures, seminars, reading and writing, and (3) a contextualized analysis and proposal of change of a given area. An area will be studied as different textures related to theories - such as mass and void, landscapes and flows, or programmed and emergent use - followed by a final project for a transformation into a sustainable urban setting, in a future where this has changed from an aim to a necessity. This will be joined by a written reflection of the relation between theory, analysis, and design proposal. Studio work builds on an intense group and individual work in rapid parallel production, reflection, and alteration of analysis and proposal supported by continuous supervision, theory sessions, and presentations. Students can expect to not only work with digital tools but also other forms of representation so as to develop the understanding of and critical relations between question, media, representational form, and proposal. The course will further serve as an introduction and overview of the basic tenets, disciplinary threads, and bodies of scholarship associated with the idea of urbanism with urban form and structure in focus but informed by other fields as geography, sociology, and history. Integration of theory and design intends to enable students to adopt a critical & reflective perspective.
- Lehrende:r: Basheer Saeed