Urban Design Studio B

This subject has the following teaching availabilities in 2011:

This subject covers the following topics: the scope, opportunities, complexities and responsibilities of urban design; urban design issues, elements and systems: analytical and design skills for generating and testing alternative approaches to the urban design development of specific sites; the role of urban design within a given spatial, social, economic and political context. Students will undertake a series of studio-based assignments in urban design leading to a major urban design proposition. The studio sessions are augmented with lectures and seminars devoted to current urban design practice.

1. To place (urban design within a complex four-dimensional social matrix of economic, political and cultural forces.
2. To introduce and explore urban Design methodology, process and practice and to ensure that the student at the end of the studio will have among other things, acquired a series of core skills.
3. To understand and be able to define the difference between strategic plans; urban planning schemes; urban design guidelines; urban design frameworks; urban character studies; urban design regulations; urban design visions; site plans; landscape designs and architectural designs.
4. To engage in an existing complex area of the metropolis and to analyze the existing fabric and represent this analysis in a clear graphic language at a range of scales.
5. To be able to map urban form and urban life including images of figure/ground relations, street-life, building bulk, typology, sun-shading, public/private relations, urban semiotics, and cognitive maps.
6. To show an understanding of urban scale through a facility in urban spatial thinking that ranges from the scale of the street to the scale of the metropolis.
7. To explore existing social and urban design theories and to focus on those effective in positively intervening with the contemporary metropolis.
8. To investigate contemporary multi-disciplinary theories of form, space, order and aesthetics, and to test their relevance for contemporary urban design practice.
9. To explore the paradoxical possibility that one can regulate to encourage urban diversity in the public interest.
10. To explore ways of representing the city in both two and three (perhaps even four) dimensional images.
11. To introduce students to Photoshop and Desktop Publishing programs to assist in image manipulation and publication quality communication material.

Assignment 1, due weeks 4 and 5, equivalent 1500 words (12.5%).

The first assignment consists of data collection and 4 quick design exercises, each working on a particular aspect of the issues inherent in the larger project.

Assignment 2, due week 8, equivalent 1800 words (15%)

Assignment 3, due week 10, equivalent 1500 words (12.5%)

Assignment 4, due week 13, equivalent 7200 words (60%).

This subject is not available as a breadth subject.

• theory historical contextual urban social critical develop and/or select from a wide range of theories (philosophical, scientific, artistic) and to make these theories essential to the task at hand, while also being able to place the task at hand into an intellectual context
• materialization / translation rigor accuracy innovation research understand and rigorously and innovatively link relations between the selected or developed theory, the selected site, the city, the urban program, and the final urban design intervention
• composition articulation syntactics tectonics articulate both large, medium, and small scale formal. spatial. ordering, and aesthetic aspects of the intervention in a sophisticated manner
• communications drawing models text verbal develop and select from an extensive range of communication options and techniques, and select a relevant means of communicating the full range of experiential, sensual, and conceptual design intentions
• pragmatics function, program sustainability science codes fully integrate the pragmatic issues of the project with their own architectural agenda and be fully aware of the experiential, sensual and conceptual consequences and potential of the pragmatic issues
• engagement commitment, input engage with, and contribute to not only their own work and others in the studio but also the work of the studio generally overall integration management internal coherence submit and/or present, a well integrated and well managed professional design process and product
• Overall integration management internal coherence submit and/or present, a well integrated and well managed professional design process and product.