Urban Technique constitutes a field between urban planning and architecture. It combines research of the organization of the urban territory with architectural strategic thinking in various scales and operates as a laboratory to re-examine the role of architectural discourse within the urban disciplines. The inclusion of the conceptual power of visualization techniques in the formation of urban projects allows for speculative designs that sponsor a different understanding of urban space and mobilizes its potential. It raises the question if it is possible to be contextual and radical at the same time.
A new course will start in November 2012 / the program will be announced in June.
> Application open for November 2012
Wolf D. Prix / Reiner Zettl, Andrea Börner
Guests and visiting Professors: Sanford Kwinter, Andrew Zago, John McMorrough among others
Urban Technique is an applied-research based design course that seeks to re-examine the role of the architectural discourse within the urban disciplines. Each course starts from its own theme which serves as the topical lens through which students develop individual positions. In three consecutive semesters strategies are dealt with in theory and design practice in order to develop solutions and concepts. The exploration of the theme is covered in lectures, discussion panels and workshops in small, team-oriented groups. Particular importance is attached to the invitation of experts from different fields to enrich the discourse and widen the repertoire of approaches. Guest lecturers will present individual but related topics, which will be investigated in open discussions or by carrying out short assignments and projects.
New dynamic modeling techniques give a new meaning to developing and testing ideas towards different sets of realities. The project and its strategic potential with the respective digital and analogue methods of communication serve as the common ground for discussion. A particular city or urban condition serve as the contextual framework for testing the ideas (thesis project) in the third semester.
Current Course (Diploma presentation March 29th, 2012)
PoroCity / Beirut study the Lebanese capital as an urban model. In collaboration with the Lebanese American University the program will focus on the capital of a country, which has a very particular history of modernization and consists of a multiplicity of cultural ambiances. PoroCity will start from Walter Benjamin’s and Siegfried Kracauers notion of porosity as a model of the mutual penetration of public and private life and its potential of reading the city as multilayered system in continuous change.
“PoroCity” refers to the measure of void space in a material sense, but also connects to concepts of improvisation, permeability, elasticity and resilience regarding the urban environment. It allows a description of spatial conditions that comprises both, the actual and projected physical state and the intrusions caused by local micro changes. Introduced in the 1920ies as a critique of modernist urban planning, the notion of porosity reconnects infrastructural means and civic life. Porosity allows for all ranges of scale, planned and unplanned built form, public and private realms as well as orchestrated and informal courses of action.
Although globalization has blurred the conventional categorization of urbanity along geographical and cultural parameters (the European, Asian, Colonial, Islamic, African city) local specificities still frame the various ecologies of a city (geographical, political, economic, ecologic, cultural, etc.) that might sponsor particular policies, fostering specific spatial, infrastructural and social constellations. Gaps and open territories in their respective organization of public and private also in their relationship with infrastructure provide areas that allow manoeuvring within and among the various levels of encroachment.
With the contemporary software tools and dynamic modeling techniques developed in the urban strategies lab, these tangible and intangible dimensions will become operative in case studies that will redefine common notions of density, spatial patterns and connectivity. The thesis project in the third semester will test the results of the research and the case studies implementing them into the urban fabric.
Current Course (started Nov. 2011)
As a sequence to the course that researched Beirut, PoroCity/Lisbon continues investigating the political implication of spatial porosity in relation to strategies based on improvisation, permeability, elasticity and resilience. Reflecting the most recent economic situation of countries on the fringe of Europe, we will look at Lisbon, the capital of Portugal with a focus on instability as thriving moment for future development. New dynamic modeling techniques will sponsor a different understanding of urban space and mobilize its potential.
