NR-W AND THE GLOBAL LANDSCAPE OFUNIVERSITYREASONOFDUNDEEM.ARCHYEAR5|2022 STUDIO BRIEF
Andy Stoane
This page and illustration:cover University of Leeds, E. C. Stoner Chamberlain,Building,PowellandBon,1963-75. Photos (this pagecover):and Anne Armstrong creativecommons.org/disko/6124512121/in/com/photos/french-https://www.flickr.photostream/Usedunder:https://licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/legalcode
Design Research
Site
2. Simons, Maarten & Masschelein, Jan. (2009). The Public and its University: Beyond Learning for Civic Employability?. European Educational Research Journal. 8. 10.2304/eerj.2009.8.2.213.
4. This is a term used by urban theorist Stephen Cairns in his writing on planetary urbanisation.
NR-W and the Global Landscape of Reason Andy Stoane
5. This is Thomas Piketty’s term.
Against this context, the studio will consider its site as something decentralised - beyond “debilitating city-centricity,” - exploring new supraurban design ideas for a new public realm of knowledge. Our site will counterpose the tendency toward naturalising “the local,” a tendency that serves to support the uneven spatial development upon which the current “global inequality regime” depends. We will instead tend toward the international, the unitary, the unifying – attempting to find new forms of public educational activity conceived at the scale of the world – A World University. Starting in Berlin with a study of Freie Universität Berlin, we will move to the North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s industrial-era economic powerhouse. With eighteen million inhabitants, this zone, containing thirty cities, is the largest urban area in Germany and the fourth-largest on the European continent. It occupies a strategically important location in the European Blue Banana, connecting it to major European cities and metropolitan areas The German region alone contains fourteen universities and over fifty colleges, with over half a million students. We will replace this assemblage with one university, connected to a broader European/World university network.
The studio invites you to research spatial responses to a reversal of the expanding realm in which the privation of public knowledge occurs. As Masschelein and Simons put it, “[t]he assumption of research along these lines is to approach the university as a place and time where research and teaching can be linked in very specific practices that actually gather humans and things, students and research objects, and constitute a local public exposed to matters of concern.” In contrast, marketised education celebrates civic employability and relies on the place-specific campus environment to sell a service-dominated branded learning experience.
In their recent work around the idea of a “world university,” educational theorists Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons invoke Foucaultian research into relations between power and education, contesting the idea of the university as an “entrepreneurial” environment. They discuss how “the public role of the university is at risk of becoming lost, or at least reduced to a set of measurable functions.” Such circumstances result in “the creation of a collective of individuals/organisations sharing nothing except for their permanent attempt to face the needs of the outside environment.”
Studio Synopsis
1. Allen, Ansgar. (2011). The idea of a world university: Can Foucauldian research offer a vision of educational futures?. Pedagogy, Culture & Society 19/3: 371. Allen discusses Simons, Maarten & Masschelein, Jan. (2009). The Public and its University: Beyond Learning for Civic Employability?. European Educational Research Journal. 8. 10.2304/eerj.2009.8.2.
3. Simons, Maarten & Masschelein, Jan. (2009). The Public and its University: Beyond Learning for Civic Employability?. European Educational Research Journal. 8. 10.2304/eerj.2009.8.2.214.
The studio will collectively research spaces of higher education and the geographic field of the North Rhine-Westphalia (centred on Duisburg and Essen), exploring educational alternatives to the landscape’s promotion of industrial heritage and green tourism. Individually, through spatial and tectonic design, you will research how space might adopt a non-rear-guard role in developing a social model where education is beyond the jurisdiction of financial capital.
AS THE WITHINTHOSEWORLDUNIVERSITYENTREPRENEURIALSPREADSTHROUGHOUTTHE...ANEXPANDINGREALMISFORMEDWITHINWHICHTHEPRIVATEUSEOFREASONISTHEONLYFORMTHATISUSED.WHOWORKWITHINTHISGLOBALUNIVERSITYSPACEAREINCREASINGLYPREOCCUPIEDBYTHEENHANCEMENTOFTHEIROWNINSTITUTIONS.THEYBECOMEABSORBEDTHEPRIVATEUSEOFREASON.1
1-3 WEEKS POWER, SOCIETY AND EDUCATION THE POLITICS OF THE CAMPUS THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE CAMPUS UK STUDY DAY-TRIPS
You will be expected to engage in this discourse, and, on the Lefebvrian basis that “space is socially produced,” to consider how there might be a reciprocity between spatial models of higher education and new social models for a world university. The world university will confront the global economy and and the competitive, place-specific, service-dominated learning experience that props up the current higher education model. The following nonexhaustive question may help you define a direction for your thesis. Can the act of spatial organisation have some kind of foregrounded role in forming a new and public locus for the reproduction of the cultural capital that education produces?
In the late twentieth century, two sociologists in particular developed further ideas of how power relations are embedded in education, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. Foucalut focussed on the idea of discipline and its ability to dominate, heirarchise and produce ‘truths.’ Bourdieu focussed on the idea of education as a form of what he described as “cultural capital,” which he argued reinforces, and is reinforced by, economic capital. Education, Bourdieu maintanins, promotes a form of “intergenerational reproduction of class differences.”
… culture and education aren’t simply hobbies or minor influences. They are hugely important in the affirmation of differences between groups and social classes and in the reproduction of those differences.
Power, Society and Education
What is an educational system, after all, if not a ritualisation of the world?
Socilological theory has a long history of discourse around the relationship between education, power and society. Émile Durkheim, in the early twentieth century theorised on the ability of education to act as a vehicle for the transition to modern industrial society and its abstract notions of solidarity (social solidarity). Although education could transmit society’s shared values, Durkheim argued it also was intrinsicaly connected to the division of labour under industrial capitalism, teaching specialisms in the specific roles. Max Weber, around this time, further highlighed the relationship between power and education, arguing that education had become a route to power in modern mass society.
Your thesis should consider the future of the campus as a locus of political attitudes within which educaton is immersed. The campus is still, to a limited degree, a publicly funded environment. What is the site of reproduction of any cultural capital that the public funding produces? The indiviual, the state, the market, the world? Why would national funding support a global product? Why would national funding support an individual (market) product?
The modern campus serves as a marketing tool to attract as many students and faculty as possible, complete with intentional “postcard moments” such as outdoor sculptural art and monumental signage for taking photographs (Figure 7), new“starchitecture” showcasing extravagant contemporary campus architectural buildings and structures, and an “arms race” that occurred in the early twenty-first century where new modernized facilities and research hubs were being built or renovated at a rapid pace.5
This is a shift that has fundamental consequences, not just for students and faculty staff, but also for campus environments, and more broadly for society. In their paper “Before the Neoliberal Campus: University, Place and the Business of Higher Education,” Jessica Fernandez & Matthew Powers observe that ”[a]though the twentieth-century campus evolved into a city-like entity facilitating many of the needs of its users and recipients internally, today’s institution often acts as urban developer and joint-venture capitalist well beyond campus borders.”3 This kind of annexation of the university by urban processes of capital accumulation supports the ability of neoliberal principles to (re)shape public institutions into a form that adjusts our comprehension of the world.
For the neoliberal project, the modern (national) university is an anathema. As Regina Queiroz notes in her research into the concept of collective registers of “the people” within neoliberalism, “[n]eoliberalism expresses a kind of re-enchantment with the exclusively individual rational actor, who claims a nonalienable space of liberty against a bureaucratic ‘iron cage”.’4 The university becomes part of the process of turning the citizen into the entrepreneur. It also become a highly competitive entity in its own right:
1 Simons, M., Masschelein, J. (2009). Towards the Idea of a World University. Interchange 40, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1007/ 32s10780-009-9087-2Ibid.Fernandez,J.,Powers,
M. (2021). Before the Neoliberal Campus: University, Place and the Business of Higher Education. Architecture and Culture, 9:1, 25-44, DOI: 10.1080/20507828.2020.1805949.
According to Simons and Masschelein, “[t]he modern university should be described as an institution with the nation state and national culture as its main reference (cf. Readings, 1996; Pritchard, 2004).”1 They describe the shift during neoliberalism from “we, citizens of the nation state and concerned with our culture” towards “we, citizens of the knowledge society and concerned with our human capital.”2
4 Individual liberty and the importance of the concept of the 5ReginapeopleQueiroz1Fernandez,J.,Powers, M. (2021).
The Politics of the Campus
WE, CITIZENS OF THE NATION STATE AND CONCERNED WITH OUR CULTURE . . . WE, CITIZENS OF THE KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY AND CONCERNED WITH OURCAPITAL.HUMAN
.
Other non-UK campuses could also be studied as a desktop exercise. Examples might include: Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright (a campus of sorts).
Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons
University of Calabria in Cosenza by Gregotti Associati, 1974
University of Calabria in Cosenza by Gregotti Associati, 1974. Competition for the University of East Bremmen, O.M. Ungers, 1976. Pablo de Olavide University, Jose Morales, 2000. Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center, Columbia University, Diller, Scofidio& Renfro, 2016. University of Chicago Centre Hong Kong, Revery Architecture, 2018. Shenzhen Institute of Design and Innovation, Dominique Perrault Architects, 2021.
To commence your spatial investigations, you will study campus environments through both desktop and observational means. On the Berlin phase of our study/field trip in week 4, we will vist Freie Universität Berlin, which you should familiarise yourselves with in advance. Before that, it is suggested that you make some day-trips to some of the significant campuses around the UK. Some suggested campus are noted opposite. While these are all campus environments form modern universities, you might want to consider also making trips to historic universities if this will play a part in your research.
IIT, Mies Van Der Rohe’, 1938Potteries Thinkbelt, Cedric Price, 1964-66. New Lausanne Polytechnic, Lausanne, Mario Botta, 1970
The university campus is a unique environment. It can be viewed as a microcosm of urban life but also as a discrete entity sitting within it. It is part public, part institutional, part residential. It is subject to highly specific temporal patterns and cycles. It connectes in various ways to an infrastructural network of sites around the planet. You will be expected to research and document various campus environments, eventually forming clear research questions and working hypotheses which will inform your thesis direction.
The Architecture of the Campus
. . a place and time where research and teaching can be linked in very specific practices that actually gather humans and things, students and research objects, and constitute a local public exposed to matters of concern.”
UK Study Day-trips
University of Leeds, E. C. Stoner Building, Chamberlain, Powell and Bon, 1963-75.
Photo: Anne
University1968.UniversityUniversitylegalcodeUsedphotostream/https://www.flickr.com/photos/french-disko/6124512121/in/Armstrongunder:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/ofSussex,FalmerHouse,BasilSpence,1959.ofStirling,RobertMatthew,Johnson,Marshall,ofEssex,KennethCapon,1962.
University of Essex. Students on the roof of one of the towers,1970.
4 WEEK STUDY TRIP AND FIELD TRIP
Destination Description Travel DuisburgEssenDusseldorfBerlin
Friday TBCOctober.14 TBCOctober.Thursday20
Local travel around North WestphaliaRhine-cities and hinterlands.
We will use Belin as a base to study Freie Universität Berlin, the last and most famous of our physical study sites. We will then move to NR-W, locating in Dusseldorf and studying the exindustrial sites around Duisburg and Essen. Why study industrial sites in a studio focusing on educational landscapes? Several reasons: First, the de-industrialisation of these sites is concomitant with the breakdown of the national programmes that supported the modern (public) university. You might question the current use of the sites for programmes of leisure and industrial heritage tourism. Can you physically re-occupy the stuctures? Can you use the infrastructural connectivity that supported these vast sites to support a new form of educational landscape? The Duisburg inland port would be particularly relevant here. Maybe you will replace the masterplans of OMA and Latz with educational masterplans? Whatever you do, it must serve as a critique of the place-based entrepreneurial university, and it must connect to a ‘global landscape of reason.’
Return train from Berlin to Dusseldorf.
Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex , Essen. Left, during its industrial operation. Right, now.
Two day study trip to Berlin, principally to study andhinterlandsinfrastructuresstudyinginWestphalia,toThreeUniversitätFreieBerlin.dayfieldtripNorthRhine-basedDusseldorfandex-industrialintheofEssenDuisburg.
DateReturn
TBC Return flight from Edinburgh to Berlin.
Accommodation
DateDeparture
Freie Universität Berlin.
Itinerary
University of Berlin, Candilis, Josic, Woods and Schiedhelm, 1963
‘Mat’environments.planoftheFree
Beijing Old TownMedina, Casablanca
In researching Freie Universität Berlin, you should study the tradition of morphological “mat” pattern. Its origins lie within the necessity of containment or self-sufficiency, and the pattern usually bring about co-operative and collaborative social-structures. Ancient Chinese city plans, Roman towns, Arabic medinas, European medieval towns … all can be considered as forms of continuous ‘mats’.
New Lausanne Polytechnic, Lausanne, Mario Botta, 1970
Early experiments in mat typology, Michel Ecochard in Casablanca. The mat reinterprets the ancient medina (top in-casablanca/planning-and-building-framework-the-grid-1-michel-ecochards-com/2016/12/07/understanding-From:right)http://socks-studio.
More recently, this type of continuity of fabric has been reinterpreted as both a means of increasing social cohesion and building up urban density. Revitalised in Europe in the late twentieth century, and named “mat planning” by Alison Smithson, many ambitious projects from the 1950s onward saw the mat as a means of promoting collective behaviour, removing the street (and thus the car) and developing efficient, compact social, human-orientated
Berlin
The Roman city of Timgad, AD 100
MAT-BUILDING CAN BE SAID TO EPITOMISE THE ANONYMOUS COLLECTIVE, WHERE THE POSSIBILITIESSHUFFLEDINDIVIDUALTHECOMEFUNCTIONSTOENRICHFABRIC,ANDTHEGAINSNEWFREEDOMSOFACTIONTHROUGHANEWANDORDER,BASEDONINTERCONNECTION,CLOSE-KNITPATTERNSOFASSOCIATION,ANDFORGROWTH,DIMINUTIONANDCHANGE.AlisonSmithson
Situated to the north west of Germany, the North Rhine-Westphalia (NR-W) was (and still is) the country’s industrial powerhouse. Several industrial cities, including Bonn, Cologne, Wuppertal, Düsseldorf, Duisburg, Essen and Dortmund, form a polycentric metropolitan area of around eighteen million people, the largest urban area in Germany and the fourth-largest on the European continent. It has a series of huge industrial sites, connected by Autobahn, rail, and river networks. Duisburg containes the largest inland port in the world. Much of the area de-industrialised from the 1980s onward, leading to largeprojects of industrial heritage and ecological tourism which attempt to acknowledge the industrial past and heal the land.
The region sits in the middle of the European Blue Banan, a discontinuous corridor of urbanisation which connects the British Midlands to Northern Italy, taking in Greater London Lille, the Benelux states and the Dutch Randstad, Brussels and along the German Rhineland, Alsace-Moselle, Basel, Zürich, Milan and Turin.
North Rhine-Westphalia.
Duisburg’s inland port - the largest in the world.
OMA’s plan for the Zollverein Complex. https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/walled-city-zollverein-oma
Duisburg
steel plant. Photo: Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / “Duisburg, Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord -- 2020 -- 7777 (bw)” / CC BY-SA 4.0
Duisburg-Nord
is a public park designed in 1991 by Latz + Partner, who state an intention “to integrate, shape, develop and interlink the existing patterns that were formed by its previous industrial use, and to find a new interpretation with a new syntax.”
The site was an iron and steel production facility, sitting amidst a vast individual landscape with the world’s biggest inland port at its heart. In its new leisure programme, Latz describe an “environmental, economic and social transformation of an old industrialised region.“ In it, “systems operate independently, such as the low-lying water park, the single fields and clumps of vegetation, the promenades at street level connecting parts of the town which were separated for decades, and the railway park with its high level promenades and the rail harp. They connect only at certain points through specific visual, functional or merely imaginary linking elements.” Latz and
Landschaftpark,
Partner.
Duisburg-Nord.Landschaftspark, 1/#&gid=lg&pid=1duisburg-nord-9434-landschaftspark-geblaesehalle-im-location-duisburg/https://de.fiylo.com/TheDuisburgLandschaftspark
duisburg-nord-de/landschaftspark-landschaften/postindustrielle-de/en/projekte/latzundpartner.https://www.
Landschaftspark, Duisburg-Nord. By Arnoldius - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62884282
Coal Mine Industrial Complex,
Essen. By Dronepicr - Imported from 500px (archived version) by the Archive Team. (detail page), CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74504465
EssenZollverein
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74504465
OMA’s model and plan for the Zollverein Complex. https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/walled-city-zollverein-oma
The Zollverein Complex is a huge coal mining former coal mining site in the city of Essen. Amongst the biggest and most technically innovative in Europe, the complex gradually ceased production through the 1980s. It was declared a heritage site shortly after closure and was masterpalnned by OMA between 2001 and 2007 to form a landscape of museum, exhibition and leisure programmes.
Zollverein
Coal Mine Industrial Complex, Essen. By Jedesto - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, php?curid=114326252wikimedia.org/w/index.https://commons.
Zollverein
Coal Mine Industrial Complex, Essen. By Ungaroo - Udo Ungar - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18596381
5-6 WEEKS CHARETTE AND MID-SEMESTER REVIEW
You will document and present:
Clear propositional ideas on how the landscapes connect . . . to each other, to their locality, to the banana and to the world.
Group agenda: Essen, reconsidering OMA’s industrial heritage masterplan as a ‘landscape of Individualreason.’ agendas: Fragments of the plan - faculty, residential, both, other.
Having carried out detailed surveys of the sites in Essen and Duisburg, you will form groups according to the development of a strategic plan. This plan must find its way into your thesis, which should be beginning to form. How will you confront ideas of the global economy, the monetisation of education and forms of cultural/human capital through space. One given is that you will use de-industrialisation as a means to re-consider land use and local/national/global infrastructural connections. For now, it is anticipated that you might form two groups (although this is very much open to discussion):
Essen Group
Clear ideas on individual fragments.
Group agenda: Duisburg, reconsidering the inland port and/or the Landschaftpark as a ‘landscape of reason.’
Your research - theoretical and empirical. Mappings and models.
As an example:
Group strategic proposals for Dundee’s waterfront, Studio A 2020/21 - ‘Ground’ Andy Stoane.
Draft publications for everything.
Individual agendas: Fragments of the plan - faculty, residential, both, other.
Duisburg group
7-12 WEEKS THESIS AND PROPOSITION : DEVELOPMENT + END-SEMESTER REVIEW
Group strategic proposals (left) and their development (right) for Dundee’s waterfront, Studio A 2020/21, ‘Ground,’ Andy Stoane.
You will also submit a half-draft of your textual thesis publication for feedback over the Christmas break. This should clearly communicate to substance of the thesis, but should also present ideas of how the propositional work relates to the textual work.
For the final semester 1 review,you will have developed the strategic plans to a point where individual propositions become apparent. This will involve a phase of simultaneous group and individual Youworking.willcurate a studio exhibition for the review. It will include an edited selection of information from the mid-semester review and a representation of the fully developed strategic plans. The individual fragments must now be clearly identified within the group matrix, but must also be represented by individual panels, models and other information.
13-23 WEEKS DETAILED THESIS ANDDEVELOPMENTPROPOSITION
TO BE ADDED IN SEMESTER 2
24WEEKS CURATION AND EXHIBITION
TO BE ADDED IN SEMESTER 2
Simons, Maarten., Masschelein, Jan. 2009. “Towards the Idea of a World University.” Interchange 40, 1–23 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-009-9087-2
Fernandez, Jessica., Powers, Matthew. 2021. “Before the Neoliberal Campus: University, Place and the Business of Higher Education”. Architecture and Culture, 9:1, 25-44, DOI: Hardingham,10.1080/20507828.2020.1805949Samantha,.Rattenbury, Kester. 2007. Supercrit#1: Cedric Price, Potteries Thinkbelt: Köhler,Routledge.Thomas.,
Saumarez Smith, Otto. 2020. Boom Cities: Architect Planners and the Politics of Radical Urban Renewal in 1960s Britain: OUP Oxford.
Muthesius, Stefan. 2011. The Post-War University: Utopianist Campus and College: Yale University Press.
Müller, Ursula. 2015. Radically Modern: Urban Planning and Architecture in 1960s Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth.
Further Information
Power, Education, Society, Publicness Ball, Stephen J (ed). 2012. Foucault and Education: Disciplines and Knowledge: Routledge.
Grenfell, Michael and James, David. 1998. Bourdieu and Education: Acts of Practical Theory: Queiroz,Routledge.Regina.
2018. “Individual liberty and the importance of the concept of the people”. Palgrave Communications 4:99 | DOI: 10.1057/s41599-018-0151-3 |www.nature.com/palc.
Le Corbusier. 1967. The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to be Used as the Basis of Our Machine-Age Civilization: Orion Press.
Universities and Campuses
Reading and Reference Material
Simons, Maarten., Masschelein. Jan. 2009. “The Public and its University: Beyond Learning for Civic Employability?”. European Educational Research Journal. 8. 10.2304/eerj.2009.8.2.213.
Further information, including main timetables, details of debates and symposia, module guide and general information on thesis/design-research can be found on MyDundee - ModulesAR50005.