2020/21 DUNDEE YEAR 4 ARCHITECTURE COURSEBOOK

Page 1

UNIVERSIT Y OF DUNDEE ARCHITECTURE 2020/21 | YE AR 4

O T H E R W I S E C

O

U

R

S

E

B

O

O

K



A R C H I T E C T U R E

2 0 2 0 / 2 1

Y E A R

4

|

O T H E R W I S E

Contents

Welcome

2

Design Research

4

The Ambition

6

The Fields

8

“The Urban” Politics, Theory, Design A Very Brief Overview

10

The Year Structure 14 The Studios 20 The Teachers 36 The Lectures 38 The Journal 42 The Exhibitions 46 Reading 48 Module Guides 50 Full Timetables 70

Semester 2 Issue, January 2021.

1


W

E

L

C

O

M

E

“ . . . the starting point of design is the proposition that things could be otherwise.”1

Harvard Professor of Urban Theory, Neil Brenner’s statement, made in the journal Fulcrum #65, effectively outlines the basis for criticality in design. To design a better future, we must inherently be critical of the present. In the same text, Brenner goes on to discuss the importance of space in this complexion, through citing Henri Lefebvre’s recognition that “unless you transform spatial organization, no revolution can ever be possible.” 2Architecture, and the spatial organisation of the built environment, clearly can have a major role to play in imagining and articulating an alternate world. Year 4 both celebrates and questions our disciplinary role in advancing social change, and ultimately in contributing to various forms of social justice. As Lefebvre said: “…new social relationships call for a new space, and vice-versa.”3 Yet the place of architecture in mechanisms for social change has long been neglected. In his book The Efficacy of Architecture, Tahl Kaminer observes that the discipline has for decades “marinated in formal and phenomenological explorations . . . while the social and political project of the modernist avant-garde [has] receded from view.”4 Through engaging theoretical discourse and positioning its actions as design research into urban various fields, Year 4 will seek to imagine a reclamation of efficacy, understanding architecture and the built environment as fields for social relations, and designing within these fields as always holding potential for social change. Your research will be contained within the thematic boundaries of six discrete urban studios. Your work this year will set you on a path of critical thinking which we hope will crystallise into a robust individual thesis in the second year of your Part 2. Over the year, you will look intently at a city, considering its architecture not in isolation, but as a multiplicity that, along with political, economic and environmental imperatives, form the totality of a social field. You will scrutinise your fields, understanding how they operate and how they are organised. You will expose and confront paradoxes, prejudices, inequalities and other issues that lie within them, asking important societal questions that can become hypothesised, tested, and eventually instantiated as new detailed spatial propositions. Through specially devised lecture courses you will develop understanding of socio-spatial and socio-tectonic theory and practice; environmental theory and design; and the regulatory and legislative landscape within which architecture of the city must operate. You will discover how critical questions in these areas can be formative in design, helping you construct project narratives, articulate design arguments and meaningfully situate your projects in a future we do not yet know. Finally, in architecture schools, the question of “real-worldliness” often rears its head in various ways. As a student of architecture, you are in a real world – your world is one of imagination, of pushing boundaries of knowledge, of contributing to intellectual discourse - you are now in a position to make a difference. To find an Otherwise. Perhaps there is a moral imperative to think Otherwise in an age where the all too familiar social injustices, economic distortions and environmental damages afflicting the planet are now joined by global pandemics. Year 4 is trying to equip you with the tools to face the need for radical future change. My hope is that you will not fiddle while Rome burns. Again, in the words of Brenner: “Young architects need to realise that this is a profession that has long contained untapped potential to promote radical forms of social change. Surely architects and designers can and must contribute to envisioning a very different form of the built environment, at every spatial scale, based on social needs, democratic empowerment and social justice rather than the unfettered rule of the commodity form.”5 Welcome to Part 2. I wish you an exciting and fruitful journey. Andy Stoane, Year Leader 1 2 3 4 5

Neil Brenner, “Designing out of the Crisis”, Fulcrum Issue 65, 2013: Neoliberalisation, London, Bedford Press (2013). Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, (Oxford, Blackwell, 1991), 59. Brenner, “Designing out of the Crisis”. Tahl Kaminer, The Efficacy of Architecture: Political Contestation and Agency, (Abingdon, Routledge, 2017), 19. Brenner, “Designing out of the Crisis”.

2


“. . . THE STARTING POINT OF DESIGN IS THE PROPOSITION THAT THINGS COULD BE OTHERWISE.” 3


D E S I G N

R E S E A R C H

In the introduction to his book Design Research in Architecture, Murray Fraser notes that “the most accepted medium for creating new insight and knowledge in any cultural or academic field, or for attempting to understand past or present or future conditions, is through research.”1 Such research, Fraser continues, “if undertaken properly, is open to the full panoply of means and techniques for designing and making that are available to architects – including sketches, drawings, physical models, digital modelling, precedent analysis, prototyping, digital manufacture, interactive design, materials testing, construction specification, site supervision, building process, user occupation, user modification and such like.” 2

Although the seeds of your insight will be sown in this (academic) institution, their growth will occur in various ways through your career. As such, you will not enter the new pastures of post-university life with passivity, instead you will be fully equipped with emerging attitudes, skills and methods which will help you understand the shape of the built environment as something subject to continual critical appraisal, not something within which you can only play only a conciliatory role.

Fraser cites Pennsylvania School of Design Professor David Leatherbarrow in attempting to break down any schism that might be presumed to exist between design and research: “Project making in architecture is no more certain of its outcome than research in modern sciences.”3 To this end, he concludes: “. . . anyone who still continues to doubt the existence or relevance of design research is a Flat Earther.”4 In other words, research is not a phase at the beginning of a project, before the architect “lapses into more normative and rational productive modes.”5 Put simply, research consumes everything you do, at all scales, and all modes and means of enquiry. Design is research and research is design. Consider the etymology of the work “project” – to throw forth - to project into the future. From theoretical investigation, to strategic city-scale thinking, to the finest tectonic details, your work will, we hope, be part of the same “totality”.

1 2 3 4 5

Murray, Fraser, Design Research in Architecture: An Overview, (Abingdon, Routledge, 2016), 1. Ibid.,2. Ibid.,3. Ibid.,3. Ibid.,2.

4


“. . . BOTH WORDS ARE SEEN NOT AS OPPOSITES, BUT AS PROJECTIVE UNDERTAKINGS EQUALLY ROOTED IN UNCERTAINTY AND CONTINGENCY, AND THUS NEEDING CONSTANTLY TO OSCILLATE BETWEEN PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE CONDITIONS. ” Murray Fraser, paraphrasing David Leatherbarrow.

5


T H E

A M B I T I O N

The course will support you in developing and articulating your positions through research - through literary investigation; through drawing; and through developing artefacts, models and images. It will do this with an end-game of building an intellectual armature that will hold all your propositional thinking over the year. It is important to understand that this armature will not be composed simply of precedent or type, but of a robust body of assembled research through which you will navigate, steering yourself toward the discovery of an original architecture. The course aims to pull apart, analyse, re-assemble or assimilate - “to put on the couch” - established ideas, buildings, systems, forms and processes, all of which will form part of your intellectual canon. We aim to find the unprecedented and the atypical. You will be expected to engage with various methods of investigation and representation, devised to assist you in thinking about your operational fields. Studio tutorials will help you unravel complexities, iterate through scales, and continually refine design work. The Humanities module will deliver an artefact-focussed way of working as well as supporting you in articulating your position textually with robust scholarly research. Six lecture courses will help you stitch together technical, spatial and environmental ideas with societal ideas. Together, these components will allow you to synthesise intellectually rigorous and technically sophisticated projects. The pan-studio course will be structured around six symbiotic components: 1.

Empirical and theoretical research and analysis on urban fields.

2.

A series of artefact and drawing-based investigations which continue stands of research into the tectonic realm.

3.

A critically positioned design project completed in three parts relating to three scales of thinking: a. A strategic urban-scale proposition. b. An architectural scale portion of the urban-scale proposition. c. A detailed tectonic elaboration of the architectural project.

4.

A series of artefacts, physical models and drawings which support your research and represent your ambitions.

5.

Six lecture courses, devised to support your textual and studio-based activities.

6.

The design, curation and production of an illustrated two-volume journal within which you will clearly demonstrate how your research yields an urban hypothesis, which itself is tested through design. The journal will serve as a summary, reflection on, and presentation of your whole year’s work.

Kenzo Tange and his plan for Tokyo Bay, 1960

6


“DESIGN IS NEVER QUITE WHAT IT CLAIMS TO BE. FORTUNATELY. ITS ATTEMPTS TO SMOOTH OVER ALL THE WORRIES AND MINIMISE ANY FRICTION ALWAYS FAILS, IN THE SAME WAY THAT ALMOST EVERY MINUTE OF DAILY LIFE IS ORGANIZED BY THE UNSUCCESSFUL ATTEMPT TO BURY THE UNCONSCIOUS. WE NEED TO PUT DESIGN ON THE COUCH.” Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley.

7


T H E

F I E L D S

While Year 4’s physical operational territories can be defined as urban “fields,” the year will begin by building an understanding of the ideas of important urban thinkers and related urban theories. These will most likely transcend the physically territories under investigation and will help you to critically analyse them, and eventually hypothesise on what their futures might be. This will be carried out through focus on a particular area of research. As such, fields can be considered as physical territories, but can also simultaneously be conceptualised as the scope of your research on those territories. These hypotheses will be tested, first through urban strategies, and eventually through the instantiation of a detailed piece of architecture. Through this process, we would like you to think about the field of the city - not to simply operate within it, but to think about what it is, what is has been and, crucially, what it might be. We will build on the understanding of cities as totalities, as places of plurality, and as places of everyday situations, subversions, rituals and representations. Crucially, we will build on the idea that any urban design imperative is inescapably concomitant with the politico-economic and social fields that form part of it. Nathaniel Coleman, in his writing on what urban sociologist Henri Lefebvre called “the problematic of architecture”, observes that there is a great benefit for architecture in “enlisting the assistance of thinkers from beyond the discipline, who are unencumbered by its professional habits, and who can thus begin imagining otherwise unthinkable alternatives.” “Architecture’s own traditions of thought arguably have a limited capacity for responding to the problematic of the city taking shape since World War II (but with much earlier origins). As such, the predicament of architecture under late capitalism - during the second half of the twentieth century, and into the early twenty-first century as well - has exceeded the capacity of the discipline to respond from within.”1

Much urban theory therefore originates outside the disciplines of architecture and urban planning. As Lefebvre notes: “Inasmuch as they deal with socially ‘real’ space, one might suppose on first consideration that architecture and texts relating to architecture would be a better choice than literary texts proper. Unfortunately, any definition of architecture itself requires a prior analysis and exposition of the concept of space.” 2 As an sociologist - and titan of late twentieth century urban thought - Lefebvre is a useful point of departure in relating your research to social ideas. In the politicoeconomic realm, Hannah Arendt and her continual preoccupation with the political ramifications of “mass society” would be equally informative. Lefebvre continually questions the possible transformation of society through the transformation of space, most famously putting forward his “right to the city” - a demand for a renewed understanding of the city as “a meeting point for building collective life”, instead of a commodified space within which its citizens are passive. 3 Arendt, on the other hand, focusses extensively on the rise of “society”, which she associates with the loss of distinction between public and private in the realm of modern “mass society,” where individuals are controlled by a single bureaucratic set of rules. In Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1974), he puts forward the idea that “…new social relationships call for a new space, and vice-versa.”4 In Arendt’s equally seminal book The Human Condition (1958), she discusses what she considers to be the loss of the collective field - “the loss the world” - through our elimination of “the space of appearance,” - the public activities, including communication, collaboration and negotiation, which take place when we “appear” together in public. “The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action . . .”5 Collectivity had atomised into individualism. 5 The work of these urban philosophers, among others, is crucial for architects who aim to think critically about the city - who aim to be “utopian.” “Who is not a utopian today? Only narrowly specialized practitioners working to order without the slightest critical examination of stipulated norms and constraints, only those not very interesting people escape utopianism.”6 1 2 3

4 5 6

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, (Oxford, Blackwell, 1991), 15. Nathaniel Coleman, Lefebvre for Architects, Routledge, Abingdon, 2015), 5. See Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City, in Writings on Cities: Henri Lefebvre, eds. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 1996). Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, (Oxford, Blackwell, 1991), 59. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 199.. Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City, in Writings on Cities: Henri Lefebvre, eds. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 1996), 151.

8


‘CHANGE LIFE!’ ‘CHANGE SOCIETY!’ THESE PRECEPTS MEAN NOTHING WITHOUT THE PRODUCTION OF AN APPROPRIATE SPACE. . . . TO CHANGE LIFE, . . . WE MUST FIRST CHANGE SPACE. Henri Lefebvre.

9


“The Urban”: Politics, Theory and Design. A Very Brief Historical Overview. Introductory Note In writing this very brief and non-exhaustive historical account of “the urban,” its bias toward urban issues of the west does not go unacknowledged. It is hoped that over time this will change, and the research focus of this year at University of Dundee will allow not only its theoretical questions to deepen and broaden, addressing discovered prejudices, inequalities and inequities across the planet, but also will allow its physical fields to expand, making important and urgent contributions to new discourse, including, in particular, the expanding field of research into issues of the global south. As such, it is hoped that this year can be viewed both as a work in progress and as an ongoing body of research in itself. ---------“The Urban” is now the dominant form of human habitat and the human population continues to gravitate toward urban areas and all they have to offer. 55% of us currently live in areas defined as “cities” and this is predicted to rise to 68% by 2050. Megacities (greater than 10 million) have increased from 10 in 1990 to 33 today, and the number is predicted to rise to 43 by 2030. 1 What of the origin of the city? According to Lefebvre, “Antiquity began with the city, while the Middle Ages (European, Western) began in the countryside.” 2 The polis originated in the ancient Greek city-states, with Rome arguably representing the first Western apotheosis of urban life. Lefebvre reminds us that, etymologically, the polis is quite literally the field of politics - “Urban existence is conflated with political existence, as the word indicates.”3 To use an Arendtian term, the ancient city’s public spaces were quite literally the manifestation of its citizens’ “actions.” “The town concentrates not only the populace but the instruments of production, capital, needs, pleasures. That is why the advent of the town implies, at the same time, the necessity of administration, police, taxes etc., in short, of the municipality . . . , and thus of politics in general.”4 The city as political entity lost its dominance through the feudalism of the Middle Ages, as land holding and serfdom shifted economic priorities to the country. “Feudal property is the result of a two-stage process: the breakdown of the Roman Empire . . . and the arrival of the barbarians.”5 After a thousand years, that power was gradually reclaimed through the emergence of the agrarian capitalism and international mercantilism of the Renaissance. Sociologist Manuel Castells talks of the “global” and the “local” complementing each other “at the beginnings of the world economy in the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, a time when the city states became centres for innovation and commerce on a worldwide scale.”6 In the “industrial age,” industry began to replace agriculture economically, stripping the great feudal landowners of their grip on power. This new economic mode, and its politico-economic transformations, played out in new urban fields, operating on larger scales than ever before, and charged with new intensities:

“Isn’t it obvious that the town is simultaneously the place, the instrument, the dramatic theatre of this gigantic metamorphosis?”7

This “dramatic theatre” brought massive urban population growth. London, for example, rose from 1 million in 1800 to almost 7 million in 1900. Yet, if the post-feudal industrial age brought us back an urban imperative, Hannah Arendt argues that the staggering and exponential growth of cities in the late-modern age, far from bringing back the forms of collective life and the “action” of the Greek Polis, actually, quite conversely, succeeded in destroying imperatives of collectivity. She discusses the paradox of “mass society’s” increasing introspection, brought about by late-capitalism and its prioritisation of the individual over the collective. This, she tells us, destroys the “space of appearance”, and thus destroys the city as a political entity.

“What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, . . . but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together.” 8

The rapid growth of society and its unsettling relationship with existing urban fabric brought largescale call for urban renewal - for the replacement of problematic, insanitary and over-crowded cities with new formations informed by modern-era progress in areas such as mechanical transportation, new standards of housing, new forms of business operation, new formations of public activity, and of course new building technologies. In this era of

widespread social, political and cultural change, modernist architects saw architecture and urban design as instruments for social amelioration. Le

Corbusier’s continual attempt to define a new city, from Ville Contemporaine (1922) to Plan Voisin (1925) to Ville Radieuse (1930) to Chandigarh (1950-60) represent the most ambitious attempts to define a new socially-reforming urbanism for this new age.

10


“ISN’T IT OBVIOUS THAT THE TOWN IS SIMULTANEOUSLY THE PLACE, THE INSTRUMENT, THE DRAMATIC THEATRE OF THIS GIGANTIC METAMORPHOSIS.” Henri Lefebvre

11


As the world shifted from an industrial economy to a service economy through the late twentieth century, and the neoliberal era beckoned, it brought with it a reaction against the socio-political mission of modernism, and an attempt to bring about a new modus-operandi for city planning. In the 1970s architects such as Robert Venturi, Denise ScottBrown, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter developed ideas on the city which lamented eclecticism, criticising the imperative for widespread renewal and “total-design” in modernist city planning. “. . . I am for messy vitality over obvious unity . . . “ stated Venturi in the book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966).9 In 1972 Venturi and Scott-Brown, along with their students from Yale, carried out a survey of Las Vegas, from which they forged a thesis that celebrated the ugly, the ordinary and the everyday over what they considered to be the the heroic and monumental priorities of the modernist city. A few years later, Rowe and Koetter published their ideas of “bricolage,” borrowed from Levi-Strauss’ anthropological work, in their book Collage City (1978). Stated as “a critical reappraisal of contemporary theories of urban planning and design”, they rejected practices of “total-design,” which they considered to be the “psychological substratum of urban theory and its practical application,” instead promoting a celebration of the city’s eclecticism, involving the co-existance of fragments from the past, present, and future.10 In this era, another reaction came in the wake of local activism by figures such as Jane Jacobs, who campaigned endlessely against the destruction of local neighbourhoods and the disregard for local issues in urban renewal projects. This found its architectural voice in architects and writers who began to theorise extensively about the relationship between public space and the design of buildings. Jan Gehl first published Life Between Buildings in 1971, and its English translation in the 1980s became influential in postmodern discourse in architecture schools. However, by the late 1980s, postmodern thinking on cities had largely polarised into two distinct, and ostensibly oppositional forms, ontologically connected through a new-found “positivism” or “anti-critical” world view. First, “populism”, as exemplified in the work of Leon and Rob Krier, and, second“engagement,” as exemplified by the work of Rem Koolhaas and his office, OMA. The Kriers aligned themselves with the growing “New Urbanist” and conservationist movements, eventually planning Prince Charles’ town at Poundbury, “built on the principles of architecture and urban planning as advocated by The Prince of Wales in [his book] ‘A Vision of Britain’.”11 Koolhaas, on the other hand, perhaps the most intellectually vociferous architect of the neoliberal age, began to strategise on new, more metropolitan, formations for a non-critical future for architecture and the city. In her essay The Irrational Exuberance of Rem Koolhaas, Ellen Dunham-Jones tells us that Koolhaas’ “essays and projects of the ‘90s smoothed the way for the parade of ‘starchitecture’ object-buildings that followed” and “encouraged his followers to shed the crippling shackles of critical theory and pick up a surfboard upon which to ride the shockwaves of the new economy.”12 In his 1987 competition entry for the new town of Melun-Senart in France, Koolhaas embraces the “average-contemporary-everyday ugliness of current European-American-Japanese architecture”, seeing his job not as the creation of the substance of the city but as the protection of his own design-world from that substance – he does this via a series of carefully organised voids from which the “merde”, as he calls it, is banished. He is ingeniously able to embrace the un-critical without actually doing it. With this came a relinquishing of the architect’s urban role to one of protection or specialism. The “ordinary” was left to the market. This century, urbanisation has exploded exponentially with the rapid rise of the global economy. Shenzhen, for example, has grown from a small town of 30,000 to a global city 13,000,000 in only thirty years. The global presence of a new super-scale of city, has brought urban theorists such as Neil Smith, Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid to research the sociospatial ramifications of such accelerating globalisation and the now accepted metanarrative of “city as machine for economic growth.” Such research has revealed, perhaps counter-intuitively, that globalisation and its associated cultural imperialism have far from homogenised “the landscapes of everyday life around the world.”13 Brenner states that “[m]ost critical geographers have stridently rejected such claims, arguing that late modern capitalism has in fact been premised upon an intensification of differences among places, regions, and territories, even as the mobility of capital, commodities, and populations is enhanced.”14 These global differences - “uneven spatial developments” as they are often referred to are supported by the tendency toward “localism” in urban research. Such a focus assumes a certain naturalisation of the local scale, prompted by the early activism of Jane Jacobs and her followers. Co-opted into processes of redevelopment under the hegemony of neoliberal economics and now branded as “placemaking”, many contemporary critics now see this as a tool of the development process, and “localism,” while often well intentioned, as a retreat - a further relinquishing of criticality, ignoring as it does the importance (and history) of multi-scalar and supraurban processes in not only supporting cities, but in realising their potential for social transformation. This has brought about a resurgence of interest in the Lefebvrian idea of urbanisation as a planetary phenomenon, where boundaries are arbitrary; where the “urban” is more of a theoretical category than an empirical object; and where the urban is a condition with no “outside.” This year we ask you to investigate, reflect on, and represent in various ways, “the urban” in the modern world. As urban territories continue to grow (or shrink) in population and importance, how can we speculate on the futures for the social and political lives they contain? How can we find different, perhaps more equitable, solutions for living in them? How can architecture mediate their temporal cycles and patterns? What new future programmes might be needed and how might architecture respond? The yield of your investigations will be played out over a spectrum of scales: from an urban-scale hypothesis and testing strategy in semester 1, to detailed testing through architectural-scale and tectonic-scale elaborations in semester 2. Successful projects will demonstrate complete reciprocity between the two semesters and all the scales. Your ideas articulated at the scale of detail should resonate with ideas articulated at the scale of architecture, the city, the world and beyond, and in doing so, will always form part of the same critical argument. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Data from UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Henri Lefebvre, Marxist Thought and the City, Minneapolis, (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. 2016), 29. Ibid., p37. Ibid. p37. Ibid. p29. Jordi Borja and Manuel Castells, Local & Global: Management of Cities in the Information Age, (London, Earthscan, 1997), 3. Lefebvre, Marxist Thought and the City, 22. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958), 52. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, (New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 16. Jacket description in Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City. (Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1978). Duchy of Cornwall, Poundbury. https://poundbury.co.uk/ Ellen Dunham-Jones, “The Irrational Exuberance of Rem Koolhaas,” Places Journal, (April 2013). Neil Brenner, New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question, (New York, Oxford University Press, 2019), 256. Ibid.

12


“WHAT MAKES MASS SOCIETY SO DIFFICULT TO BEAR IS NOT THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE INVOLVED . . . BUT THE FACT THAT THE WORLD BETWEEN THEM HAS LOST ITS POWER TO GATHER THEM TOGETHER.” Hannah Arendt.

13


THE YEAR STRUCTURE The year is structured around the formation of a critical armature that will bring together, hold, and inform all your work, across all scales and all modes of operation. This involves three inter-related and overlapping phases of work relating to the three modules. Phases 1 and 2 consist of theoretical and empirical urban analysis, strategic design operations within the social field of the city, (module AR41001) and a humanities project devised to promote research through drawing and making (module HT40003). Phase 3 moves on to fully resonant spatial, formal and tectonic design activity, supplemented by workshops assisting with the understanding of the structural, environmental and regulatory frameworks within which the design projects are operating (module AR40007). The phases are summarised in the infographic below and explained fully in the module guide section.

STUDIO A

INDIVIDUAL

GROUP

INDIVIDUAL

GROUP

INDIVIDUAL

INDIVIDUAL

INDIVIDUAL

GROUP

STUDIO B

C O R

STUDIO C

U S

STUDIO D

E

STUDIO E

14

INDIVIDUAL

INSTANTIATION TECTONIC SCALE SUB-FRAGMENT

HUMANITIES THINKING MACHINE

INSTANTIATION ARCHITERCTURAL SCALE FRAGMENT

HUMANITIES THINKING MACHINE

DEVELOPMENT OF STRATEGY URBAN SCALE STRATEGY

HUMANITIES THINKING MACHINE

CONSTRUCTION OF HYPOTHESIS URBAN SCALE / TOTALITY

HUMANITIES THINKING MACHINE

EMPIRICAL RESEARCH & ANALYSIS QUESTIONS NUANCED BY FIELD

HUMANITIES THINKING MACHINE

THEORETICAL RESEARCH & ANALYSIS QUESTIONS NUANCED BY THEORY

QUESTIONS STUDIO RESEARCH

PEDAGOGICAL FRAME ‘OTHERWISE’

Phase 1 will start with group work (stages 1, 2 and 3) and will end with individual work (stage 4). Phase 2 (Humanities) will be individual, bit may involve some groupwork. Phase 3 (stages 5 and 6) will be individual.

INDIVIDUAL


“CITIES WERE THE FIRST FORM OF SOCIAL MEDIA. URBAN DENSITY MAXIMISES POSSIBLE SOCIAL CONNECTIONS. YOU WALK 100 METRES FROM HOME IN A VILLAGE, AND YOU SEE TWO COWS AND YOUR GRANDPARENTS. YOU WALK 100 METRES IN A CITY, AND YOU HAVE POTENTIAL INTERACTIONS WITH 1,000 PEOPLE.” Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley.

15


Phase 1 [Semester 1]: The City and its Social Field | Module AR41001 Urban Theory, Analysis & Strategy

“Space is social morphology: it is to lived experience what form itself is to the living organism, and just as intimately bound up with function and structure” Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space.

Through a combination of theoretical investigation, empirical survey, mapping and case study analysis, you will build up a picture of various phenomena affecting cities and their social fields. By operating across disciplinary boundaries and gradually bringing analytical methods and operational scales together, you will be able to consider different methods of engagement with the fabric of your city, in accordance with your emerging interests and preoccupations. Through this process, you will slowly but surely glean critical intelligence which can be used to make realistic hypotheses, built on intellectually rigorous speculations for your chosen environments. Through its influence of your projects, this phase will continue to the end of the academic year, but will formally conclude in week 7 with the presentation of an urban-scale hypothesis, and design strategy. You will by this stage have a strategic plan for the elaboration of an architecture-scale proposition, which will be developed in detail through your integrated design project.

Phase 2 [Semester 1]: The Thinking Machine | Module HT40003 Humanities 4 The principle tasks of Year 4 Humanities will be to build a thinking machine, write with it, attend the lectures, and finally, write a short critical reflection that situates your design studio project within the history of architectural ideas. The thinking machine is the main bit. It is usually a chance to build objects in the School’s Make Labs. This year, access to workshops will be COVID-limited, and we expect that most thinking machines will be digital.

“Further expanding the already large class of Foucauldian apparatuses, I shall call an apparatus [dispositif] literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and – why not – language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses – one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primitive inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face.”

Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is an apparatus’ in What is an Apparatus and other essays (2006/2009) p.14.

16


“SOMETIMES A BUILDING IS NOT THE BEST MEANS TO EXPLORE ARCHITECTURAL IDEAS.” Jonathan Hill.

17


Phase 3 [Semester 2]: Instantiation: Fragments and Sub-Fragments | Module AR40007 Integrated Design 4

“. . . detect the crystal of the total event in the analysis of the small, individual moment.” Walter Benjamin

Operating within the intellectual armature you have built through your urban-scale and humanities work, you will now increase resolution in two stages, demonstrating instances (instantiating) your city-scale work, which will have been fleshed-out conceptually through the design strategy. Everything you do will be contextualised within the socio-urban ambition of your work. Successful projects will always demonstrate complete reciprocity between the different scales of the semesters. You must begin to understand how a single drawn line in the city can be charged with socio-spatial content, but when scaled up, that same line will contain multiple layers of tectonic information, which serve to not only mediate that socio-spatial content, but also to bring about architectural form. You will be expected to produce fully synthesised information on lighting, ventilation, acoustics, fire separation and escape, along with other building services. How can your work at the scale of architectural space, form and tectonics resonate with your work at the scale of the city and beyond? How can all this work form a consistent and robust design argument? How can it constitute an Otherwise? In asking these questions you must simultaneously operate at all scales - never losing sight of your theoretical and field analysis, your hypothesis, your strategy, and the intellectual armature all this has formed - even when operating at the scale of nuts and bolts. In this way, you will create a fully “integrated” work of architecture.

Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles: Top: Services and construction of pilotis. Below: The omnipresent cell of dwelling - from top left: the cellular frame; the ”individual moment”; the public spaces; the collective “house”; the city.

18


“SPACE IS SOCIAL MORPHOLOGY: IT IS TO LIVED EXPERIENCE WHAT FORM ITSELF IS TO THE LIVING ORGANISM, AND JUST AS INTIMATELY BOUND UP WITH FUNCTION AND STRUCTURE” Henri Lefebvre.

19


THE ST

20


UDIOS

21


T

H

E

S

T

U

D

I

O

S

In Year 4 the course will operate within five studios. A list of the studios is included below and the following ten pages provide a short descriptor of each, highlighting the thematic territories within which it will operate and defining its key research question(s). Please read the descriptors carefully. You will be asked to complete the proforma opposite so that your specific interests and educational requirements can be aligned with the most appropriate studio. STUDIO A: GROUND AND EARTH. Tutor: Andy Stoane.

STUDIO B: MACRO MICRO 4 [HOME NOT HOUSE]. Tutor: Sandra Costa Santos.

STUDIO C: CALEDONIAN DREAMS. Tutor: Yorgos Berdos.

STUDIO D: STREETWORK 4. Tutor: Helen O’Connor.

STUDIO E: IF YOU’VE MET ONE INDIVIDUAL WITH AUTISM. Tutor: Neil Verow.

STUDIO F: ROOMS+CITIES 4 [THE ARCHIVE AS A ROOM IN THE CITY]. Tutor: Lorens Holm.

- Each studio will provide you with its own detailed briefing documentation. - Your studio will be your academic home for both semesters.

Important Notes: Part 2 provides a diverse suite of studios, operating across two years. Some of these studios outlined on the following pages are coupled - thematically linked across both years of Part2. For context, a summary of both years’ studios is included. While the coupling might allow you the opportunity to expand ideas constituted in year 4 into an individual thesis in year 5, equally, discoveries from the year 4 studio might take students into a different year 5 studio, whose investigation can be nuanced by their year 4 learning. Whether forming a linear intellectual trajectory or one of cross-fertilisation, part 2 should always be considered as a holistic learning experience. 1. You are selecting a YEAR 4 studio only. 2. Coupled studios DO NOT mean you have to take the same studio in Year 5.

22


YEAR 4 STUDIO SELECTION PROFORMA Name: Course and mode of study (please tick): MArch.

BA Arch Studies (Wuhan University).

In first semester I will be studying online.

In first semester I will be studying on campus.

SECTION 1: Please outline in no more than 150 words where you feel your urban and architectural research interests might lie. Please state why.

SECTION 2: Please outline what you consider to be your areas of strength or weakness. STRENGTHS:

WEAKNESSES / AREAS THAT WOULD BENEFIT FROM INCREASED FOCUS:

SECTION 3: Please tick the THREE of the following studios that you feel best reflect your interests, strengths and weaknesses.

STUDIO A: GROUND AND EARTH.

STUDIO B: MACRO MICRO 4 [HOME NOT HOUSE].

STUDIO C: CALEDONIAN DREAMS.

STUDIO D: STREETWORK 4.

STUDIO E: IF YOU’VE MET ONE INDIVIDUAL WITH AUTISM.

STUDIO F: ROOMS AND CITIES 4 [THE ARCHIVE AS A ROOM IN THE CITY]. 23


STUDIO A | GROUND AND EARTH: ANDY STOANE The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘this is mine’, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, ‘Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody. Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1775

GROUND: YEAR 4 Ever since Gestalt psychology promoted figure to ground relationships in human perception. architects and urbanists have borrowed from this idea to create a schema within which the city could be understood and theorised. The thinking is almost always predicated on an understanding of figure (foreground) as artificial and constructed, and ground (background) as existent and residual. Yet today the definition of any real “ground” in our cities is becoming increasingly moot. From nineteenth century infrastructures and ground consolidations, to massive twentieth century inhabited urban podiums, since the industrial age it could be argued that our preoccupation has been less about developing a means of inhabiting the surface of the earth, and more about escaping it. Much of our urban landscape is “artificial”. People live and work high above what was once the single ground; civic, public and commercial facilities exist in elevated artificial interconnected landscapes; shopping malls and other quasi-public spaces connect to transportation hubs, which themselves connect to increasingly spatialised networks of transport systems buried deep into the earth and used by millions of people every day. These often exist on the scale of whole districts. In the connectivity of the twenty-first century city, the very idea of figure to ground relationships is becoming questionable. Drawing on this phenomenon of the contemporary city, the studio will seek to discover and design new urban relationships forged from architecture without ground . . . or maybe ground without architecture. From Hong Kong to Shanghai to London to Cumbernauld, our research will take us to urban fields near and far, where artificial grounds prevail through design and necessity. We will localise the research yield through a major work of design in an alternate Dundee, stretched along the already artificial landscape of its waterfront, and imagined under an agency for architecture in which the design of the city is realigned with socio-spatial ideas. Can these new relationships offer scope for a reconsidered occupation of the city, increasing its compactness and providing new fields for urban propinquity?

EARTH: YEAR 5 “[I]t is easier to imagine the end of the world than changes in the eco-capitalist order and its inequities” said Fredric Jamieson. It is undeniable that the so called “urban-age”, with its trope of continued economic growth and concomitant urbanisation, has consumed hinterlands, commodified the rural, instrumentalised urban– rural dialectics, and co-opted practices of sustainability into the end-game of maintaining its hegemonic metanarrative. The entrenched divisions that exist in this system are synonomous with “uneven spatial development” across the planet, which the “trap of localism,” as Neil Brenner calls it, only serves to support. The studio will consider “the urban” as something decentralised - beyond what urban theorist Stephen Cairns describes as “debilitating city-centricity,” In its analysis we will seek new supraurban design ideas for the built urban environment, premised on the “urban” as something always imagined on a global scale, but always localised in the realm of somewhere. Can the conceptualisation of a non city-centric planetary urbanisation offer scope for the design of an equitable habitat without expropriation or enforced consensus? 24


Illustrations, top to bottom: Buckminster Fuller, 4D Timelock, 1927. A world map, characteristically for Fuller, developing whole world solutions for housing. Prefabricated towers were to be dropped by Zeppelin and erected in a single day, providing two billion new homes across a fully urbanised world. Crossrail, London Liverpool Street. 3D model showing structure and space above and below “ground”. Mapping of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, from Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook by Adam Frampton, Jonathan D Solomon and Clara Wong. The book presents mappings of non-ground-based, publicly accessible areas of Hong Kong, which the authors consider as “a template for public space within future cities undergoing intense densification (and subject to changing weather).” Drawings from the book Terrestrial Tales: 100+ Takes on Earth by Marc Angélil and Cary Siress. The authors describe the first as a “drawing by Angelo Bucci entitled The Thin Layer depicting Earth’s boundary as a shallow zone of approximately 3.5 kilometres that constitutes the inhabitable realm of the planet; what appears as a single line is actually comprised of two lines, the inner and outer circles of the thin layer.” The next two drawings are described by the authors as “Diagrams of uneven world development; the first is the socalled “Brandt Line” from the 1980 Brandt Report prepared by an independent commission of the World Bank, proposing a new “poverty line” demarcating what was then called the developed “First World” above and the underdeveloped “Third World” below;” the second shows archipelagos of affluence scattered around the globe, disclosing the imbalance of wealth accumulation worldwide, based on the Brookings Institution report Global MetroMonitor 2014. (Leonard Streich, Elena Schütz, Julian Schubert from Something Fantastic, Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich, 2019).

25


STUDIO B | MACRO MICRO: SANDRA COSTA SANTOS HOME NOT HOUSE: YEAR 4 The ideal of home, while universal, exists simultaneously as a deep-rooted individual concept- at once fantasy, memory, and longing- and as a cultural norm. One speaks quite easily of “the American dream home” or the “traditional” Dogon houses in Mali. Embedded within the spaces, between the objects, of all homes are implicit roles for men and women, for individual and community, for majority and minority groups within any society. Gwendolyn Wright, 1991 What is home? Home is a political ground. Home is an urgency in the context of urbanisation and climate emergency. We can’t address the question of home at the individual level, because understanding home is understanding society. Home life (domesticity) reflects a society’s value system and is subject to social, political and economic pressures; just like the contemporary withdrawal from public life into the home reflects our privatised lifestyles. Therefore, the Studio’s driving question on home (not house) opens a much larger problem about public life: who are we as society? The problem with re-thinking home is that domesticity develops within the spatial arrangements of the house and its location within a wider urban realm. The house is a powerful instrument for predetermining and enforcing home. As an instrument, it has been successful throughout various housing reforms that valorised certain social relations, collectives and morals. While conservatives have focussed on the privatized family haven, progressive reformers have championed collective space and shared resources. The urban and material qualities of housing are key to its political power: how can housing support new types of collective life? MACRO MICRO aims to use the disciplinary tools of architecture to experiment and develop an argument on home (as Morley’s ideology) and the urban (as Lefebvre’s social space). Research by MACRO MICRO students last term revealed overcrowding in Dundee’s Hilltown as the acute consequence of the city’s housing crisis and the gentrification of the area. Design proposals within the Unit should explore the intimacy of domesticity and the social relations of public life within the context of Dundee.

HOUSING THE CITY: YEAR 5 Housing (…) offers a place to be, is the principal right that allows private life and therefore social relations to flourish. Without housing one is not able to function and integrate oneself into social life. Therefore, the right to housing should be seen as paramount. Peter King, 2017 More people live and work in the city, resulting in three growing trends: urbanisation, lone living and freelancing. The immediate consequence is an increasing strain on resources, space and dwellers’ wellbeing. At the micro scale, housing speaks of intimacy, safety and care. At the macro scale (neighbourhood, district or city), housing can support new collectives pooling resources, reducing energy consumption and production, water, food production, consumption and waste. However, despite the undeniable relevance of housing, Peter King (2017) reminds us that the ‘right to housing’ is not a natural idea but a social construct. Within this theoretical context, MACRO MICRO experiments with the role of housing in urban transformation and social justice. Year 5 continues the discussion on Y4 with a focus on the housing inequalities that threaten the sustainable development of the city, and asks students to build a critical argument on how to house the urban population. Given that the speculative quality of architecture allows us to represent, analyse and visualise large sets of information from various disciplines, this year we will engage in conversation with Dundee City Council to discuss such a complex problem. MACRO MICRO will work in the spatial, social and political context of Dundee City and in partnership with the City Council. We know that the City has a relatively high level of deprivation (38% in 2020); but housing inequality is a long-standing historic problem in Dundee. Design proposals on sheltered accommodation should respond (at the macro and micro scale) to the City’s sustainable development. These proposals may consider the lack of social facilities that goes hand in hand with housing deprivation and segregation. 26


From top: In 1932 Karel Teige ciriticised micro typologies for living in his book The Minimum Dwelling. He proposed an alternative collective dwelling with shared housekeeping, cooking and childcare and minimal independent space for each adult. In Share Yaraicho (2012), Satoko Shinohara + Ayano Uchimura respond to the demand for alternative housing models in Japan that seeks saving resources and allowing roommate cohabitation. In Onagawa Container Temporary Housing (2011), Shigeru Ban Architects selected shipping containers as a basic module for a temporary housing colony and combined them into slab structures. In Leisurescape London (2002), Bohn & Viljoen start their conceptual work on CPUL City. It provides an escape for urban city dwellers and a productive landscape for food consumption.

27


STUDIO C | CALEDONIAN DREAMS: YORGOS BERDOS

YEAR 4 “The question of infrastructure pervades global cities, especially those whose populations have grown and shrunk in the wake of evolving social, political, and economic shifts.” From Scaling Infrastructure, MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism.

This Studio seeks to investigate the relationship between infrastructure works and architecture within the broader context of urban processes at a territorial scale. As cities continue to grow, large urban agglomerations have become increasingly dependent on key networks of infrastructure, lines of production and logistical landscapes. These elements that make possible the operation of cities, often times, lie outside or in the outskirts of urban centres but are strongly connected to the urban core at the larger territorial level by means of various networks of communication. At the same time, these landscapes are also associated with specific building typologies, which have not been critically examined and mostly disregarded by professional architects. Examples of these building types are: large distribution facilities (FedEX, Amazon), industrial parks or data server centres. These are building types that have emerged only recently as a response to intense demands in urban cores and as result of advances in information technologies and communication (ITC). These buildings types are situated among multiple networks and operate at various scales; they play a crucial role in the operation of the cities they serve and also have an immense influence on the immediate communities that surround them. No coherent strategy has been put forward for organising these operational landscapes with a clear understanding of the patterns of urbanisation that are generated in the local communities and the environment where activities of production and distribution take place. As part of this investigation, not only is it important to pay close attention to the ecological impact in these areas but also understand how they are situated within larger networks of communication on a territorial scale. The studio will seek to research the city from the perspective of its operational systems and logistical processes. This will happen first through questioning the very idea of urban infrastructures, then by detailed case study analysis of one of Amazon’s Fulfilment Centres and the larger pattern of urbanisation that emerges from it. Then finally, through detailed design, we will localise the yield of that research. The site is a territory that was itself identified as a means of scaling Scotland’s infrastructural networks across the world over three hundred years ago in a bungled attempt at colonisation - Panama City, Panama. The goal of the studio course is to explore scenarios for urban growth processes as they relate to activities of resource extraction, distribution and logistical operations.

28


Question to Rem Koolhaas relating to the image Eating Oysters with boxing gloves, naked, on the nth floor, in Delirious New York. Statistical data on cities on the cover of LSE’s conference publication, The Endless City. The Panama Canal. Scotland’s proposed colony.

29


STUDIO D | STREETWORK: HELEN O’CONNOR

STREETWORK YEAR 4 The current fashion for discussing the future of cities, and how their structure will emerge from the global market and new information technologies is as futile as the modernist discourses of the twentieth century. These ideologies…define themselves in contrast to what exists. They confront the vivid plurality of the real city with the deadening unity of an ideal city, an ideal which will always be insufficient, incomplete and disappointing in the face of an infinitely complex reality. Rather than attempting to conceptualise the whole of urbanism, a critical architecture can emerge by ignoring the big and the general and work with the minute and the highly specific. (Caruso, 2008) The premise of the unit is to situate learning in a real urban context, addressing tangible, current urban problems. This context is not only the physical, material form of the city, but an overlapping series of complex, dynamic ‘socially constructed’ networks – economic, political etc. We’re interested in developing creative, architectural responses within the opportunities and constraints presented by this reading of the city. A proposition for an ‘otherwise’ might begin from a close and careful reading of a place, and accepting, as Adam Caruso suggests that ‘architecture is about altering and extending what is already there’, that may mean buildings (we’re interested in the proposition that we should never demolish another building) but would equally apply to the wider fabric of the city. The unit will be working with Perth as a physical context, building on the fieldwork completed by final year students last session, and beginning from a critical analysis of their proposals, made pre-covid 19, in the light of current discourse around post-covid cities: • • •

How do we reconcile density with equitable access to light, air and space? How might we reoccupy increasing vacant urban centres? How might we live/work from this point forward – what are our cities for?

We’re interested in two related approaches to architecture in and of the city - making massive small change, and urban acupuncture – a term coined by Manuel de Sola Morales – relatively small scale architectural interventions can act as catalysts for change… where on the surface do you act in order to have most beneficial impact? What networks might this action impact upon? Ultimately design proposals will be explored at a human scale – we’re interested in the city at eye level, the relationship between people and their environment.

STREETWORK YEAR 5 ‘transdiciplinary knowledge in architecture and urbanism is distinguished by three features: the relationship of discipline (theory), to profession (practice), an ethical dimension, and the experimental quality of design’ (Rendell, 2020, p. 15) While the focus of streetwork in year 4 is Architecture, the parallel year 5 unit is the locus of MArch with Urban Planning – it is therefore transdisciplinary, acting across both disciplines and engaging directly with city ‘actors’ (politicians, city officials, city organisations and communities). Year 4 students may take part in these conversations, participate in Perth orientated events and discussions etc, but are not expected to engage directly with ‘urban planning’ content beyond the scope of the Year 4 course.

30


The title ‘Streetwork’ is stolen from 1970’s urban activist Colin Ward, who proposed it as an alternative to ‘Fieldwork’ – the city as a classroom for learning about our urban environments. This project by Liam Cox (2019/20) explored how a neighbourhood might be reconstructed through utilizing constrained sites considered un-economic by private developers as sites for publicly funded housing. WWM Architects proposal for the ‘Bankside Urban Forest’ identified a series of spaces they referred to as ‘clearings’. These were gathering spaces and sites for intervention. (Witherford, 2018). Caruso, A. (2008). The Emotional City. In The Feeling of Things Distributed Art Pub Incorporated.

31


STUDIO E | IF YOU’VE MET ONE INDIVIDUAL WITH AUTISM: NEIL VEROW (...YOU’VE MET ONE INDIVIDUAL WITH AUTISM. Dr Stephen Shore, Adelphi University. http://www.autismasperger.net/) YEAR 4 Autism – a lifelong developmental disability, often referred to as Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The condition was first identified in children in the 1940s. With better understanding and diagnosis the estimated prevalence has risen from 1 in 2,500 in 1979 to as high as 1 in 54 children in the USA now. (WHO figures) https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)00337-2/fulltext https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05112-1 Autistic Spectrum Disorder: Autism is not a single condition, rather a spectrum. Each person has a distinct set of strengths and challenges. Some may require 24-hour support in every aspect of their daily lives. Others may live entirely independently. Around half also have a learning disability; others are high-functioning: Stephen Wiltshire, Albert Einstein, Stanley Kubrick, Charles Darwin, Tesla, Mozart, Michelangelo, Rain Man, and a proportionally high number of employees in Silicon Valley. In the eight decades since the first children were diagnosed many have reached adulthood. Of 58,000 people diagnosed as on the spectrum in Scotland, 80% are adults. Including families, ASD is part of daily life for 2.8 million people in the UK, with a cost around £28.2 billion per year. Austerity has put additional pressures on the funding of essential care for an autistic population distributed in independent and often isolated homes in the wider community. National Audit Office Report, 2009 The Project: Many, particularly those with low-functioning ASD live in insecure tenancies, in inadequately adapted mainstream housing, often with a lone visiting carer, already locked down even before COVID. Purpose-built, clustered accommodation can create a mutually supportive environment, give opportunities for social interaction for service users and providers, and bring efficiencies in care provision though it is important to balance the generalised and “normal” against the ASD-specific, to avoid creating a ghetto or institution. The Distant: Beginning with the urban morphology of the City (Dundee), considering current planning policies, and the cost and availability of land, you’ll assemble a portfolio of sites, with a detailed analysis of the opportunities and shortcomings of each to allow the systematic selection of one with which to work in semester 2. The Intermediate: The programme will be organised to encourage interaction between residents, service providers and the public in small or larger groups while keeping the option to withdraw - incremental socialisation and proxemics - the study of human use of space and the effects that population density has on behaviour, communication, and social interaction. The Intimate: You will consider the acoustic environment, lighting - natural and artificial, colour palette, material selection, legibility, navigability and visual complexity at a detailed level. Research questions: There is debate about the potential transferability between sensory sensitive and neurotypical design. Can or should there be such a thing as universal design or are the concerns mutually exclusive? By developing an understanding of the particular requirements of one specialised population can we gain insights in design for others - accommodation for seniors, those with dementia, mental health facilities, and can it inform generalised design?

32


Images from top: ASD project by Athina Ralli, Lanark, 2016. The Triad of Impairments that define ASD. Miscellaneous publications.

33


STUDIO F | ROOMS+CITIES LORENS HOLM ARCHIVE IN THE CITY: YEAR 4 Think of all those rows and rows of shelves and how easy it would be to get lost in them. The problem for the user of an archive is how to navigate the secretions of history so that you can make a narrative that orients you. It is a spatial problem. The plan was chosen because it is so strange. Design an archive for Blackness, a publicly visible archive of contemporary environmental information (newspapers and other records of current events) that has a clear street presence, works off the street, and has a walk-in clinic and remix lab. The archive must be on-line accessible and have a public face where search results by private member of the public are vetted and broadcast publicly. The aim of this institution is to raise environmental consciousness by providing people with a vehicle for publicly fact checking government statements and evaluating current events and projects, against environmental knowledge. The archive may be centralised in one place or it may be distributed around the city as a series of storefronts. It is a public service institution but it could be an institution like Caird Hall (big, in one place, fancy) or ubiquitous and distributed like infrastructure (public phone boxes, bus shelters, cast iron manhole covers and drains, (remember SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus))). The archive program involves both centralisation and dispersal, the centralization of lots of information in one place, and its dispersal to people. I imagine that this archive is one of several, each associated with an on-line off-line area of town, and each associated with an area of political discourse: There would be one for crime poverty drug abuse. There would be one for war and terrorism and international affairs. There is this one for the environment, sustainability, renewables, reuse, lifestyles. The aim of this project is to explore themes around the digital local, spatial and digital hybrid publics, as platforms for the togetherness of people which is the basis of collective life and political power. What Hannah Arendt calls the space of appearance updated for the digital age when public figures make public announcements from the bedroom. We could ask a series of questions: What is a city of information, what is a noetic environment, what is a digital public? Each project will find its own trajectory, which may also include (based on our starting points in urban analysis) other issues like planetary urbanism, figure ground, intercity montage. We are playing a long game here: to visualise a hybrid digital and spatial complex for the future political city. Blackness was chosen because it is so unloved. Blackness was chosen because it is such a dump. Blackness was chosen because we can reconfigure so much of it, the streets and lots. Blackness was chosen because, with Y5 we are interested in centres and edges, edges which are centres (Kingsway, Waterfront), and centres (like Blackness) which are peripheral. The integrated design project will include the development of your own design brief, site plans and sections, building plans and sections, and details at an appropriate scale, including a 1:50 building section that cuts through significant spaces and structures, and at least two perspectives, inside looking out and outside looking in. You will also draw a tell-tale detail = a detail that is emblematic of the whole. What is an archive? For us, it is a curated source of information and apparatus for information display, a slight extension of the term from what is typically associated with the records of an institution, although this one could be associated with the city of Dundee Council. It is a combination archive, storefront, internet café, re-mix lab, and walk-in clinic. It aims to cure the ecosystem of bad ideas and lies. Note: rooms+cities4 will work closely with rooms+cities5, at least in the first 7 weeks, at the urban scale. If you are working on an archive in the city, maybe they are working on a city in the archive. We will begin with a close reading of the city through an intense exercise in re-combining and articulating plans of canonic cities, which – for purposes of argument – will include the plan of Dundee.

CITY IN THE ARCHIVE: YEAR 5

“Wherever you go, you will be a polis.” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958) p.198.

Following last November’s conference, Architecture & Collective Life, the rooms+cities unit will look at how the individual and the collective emerge in the city, as architectural forms of representation and accommodation. The term will begin with a close reading of selected rooms and cities, in order to develop the grammars and typologies of rooms and cities. We will progress to building projects whose sites and cities have yet to be determined. The projects must allow for development at a number of scales from the very large (planetary) to the very small (the caress).

34


Above: Detail, Geovanni Battista Piranesi, Campo Marzio Plan of Rome (1762)

A few notes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive >>> ‘An archive is an accumulation of historical records – in any media – or the physical facility in which they are located. [1] Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization’s lifetime,… ‘Archives consist of records that have been selected for permanent or long-term preservation on grounds of their enduring cultural, historical, or evidentiary value. Archival records are normally unpublished and almost always unique, unlike books or magazines.’ ‘the secretions of an [institutional] organism’ Vivian Galbraith, Studies in the Public Records (London, 1948) p3

35


T

H

E

T

E

A

C

H

E

R

S

Andy Stoane, Year Leader / Module Leader / Studio Leader. Andy has reciprocated teaching, practice and research throughout his career. He has held positions in several UK universities, alongside directing his own eponymous practice and research studio in Edinburgh. His current research focuses on the disciplinary position of architecture in the politics and design of mass housing. He joined Dundee in 2017. Lorens Holm, Module Leader / Studio Leader. Lorens is Reader in Architecture and Director of the Geddes Institute for Urban Research. His teaching uses architectural theory to open up a space for designing new forms of city and social life. His research focuses on the thought threads that link architecture to philosophy, history, psychoanalysis, and machines. He is a registered architect in the UK and the State of Massachusetts.

Sandra Costa Santos, Studio Leader. Sandra joined the University of Dundee as Senior Lecturer in 2018. She registered as an architect in UK in 2002, and in Spain in 2007 after completing her PhD in 2006. Her research interests include home, housing, and architecture as social construction.

Yorgos Berdos, MP&L Leader, Studio Leader. Yorgos is a Teaching Fellow at The University of Edinburgh, a Lecturer at The University of Dundee and a registered Architect in the UK and Greece. He has taught, lectured and practiced locally and internationally and is an examiner for the ARB. His work explores ways in which architectural design and thinking are not limited to prescribed roles. His current doctoral research investigates the role of Trust as a design parameter across different scales and systems. Helen O’Conner, Studio Leader. Helen studied Architecture at the University of Dundee and began teaching part-time in the school shortly after achieving her Part 3 qualification. She combined teaching with practice (Architectural and Exhibition Design) for several years before taking a full-time position with the University in 1999.

Neil Verow, Studio Leader. Neil spent the last quarter of the twentieth century in private practice in Northern England where the pleasures of working with existing buildings and local communities were offset by the need to find 25 salaries each month. The twenty-first century has been spent in Dundee sharing those experiences, and some new ones.

Tamer Gado, Environment Leader.

36


“YOUNG ARCHITECTS NEED TO REALISE THAT THIS IS A PROFESSION THAT HAS LONG CONTAINED UNTAPPED POTENTIAL TO PROMOTE RADICAL FORMS OF SOCIAL CHANGE. AS HENRI LEFEBVRE RECOGNIZED, UNLESS YOU TRANSFORM SPATIAL ORGANIZATION, NO REVOLUTION CAN EVER BE POSSIBLE . . . SURELY ARCHITECTS AND DESIGNERS CAN AND MUST CONTRIBUTE TO ENVISIONING A VERY DIFFERENT FORM OF THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT, AT EVERY SPATIAL SCALE, BASED ON SOCIAL NEEDS, DEMOCRATIC EMPOWERMENT AND SOCIAL JUSTICE RATHER THAN THE UNFETTERED RULE OF THE COMMODITY FORM.” N. Brenner, Designing out of the Crisis, Fulcrum Issue 65, 2013: Neoliberalisation, London, Bedford Press, 2013.

37


T H E

L E C T U R E S

Reclaiming Tectonics: [Andy Stoane] Reclaiming Tectonics will discuss the relationship between society, technology and space. It intends to assist you in synthesising critical design positions with tectonic approaches. The lectures position technology relative to significant politico-economic events and ensuing societal attitudes, before introducing detailed explanations of structures, systems and techniques emerging from the specific periods. The following lectures will be delivered (they may be subject to change). 1. THE TECTONIC QUESTION: An Introduction to Techno-cultural Thinking will explore the etymology of the word, its varied use and relevance within historical techno-cultural paradigms of architectural design. Learning expectations and outputs will be discussed and example work illustrated. 2. INFRASTRUCTURE: and its Spatial Ramifications will look at the significance of infrastructure in urban development, from the infrastructure of transportation and the street to the infrastructural networks of information which preoccupy us today. It will then move on to look at specific infrastructural devices within architectural design and their spatial ramifications – corridors, stairs, ramps, elevators, escalators and paternosters. 3. COMPLEXIO OPPOSITORUM: Renaissance Humanism, Civic Life and Mathematics will look at the role of mathematics in the architecture of ancient civilisations, and its use in developing systems of spatio-technical order. It will analyse the classical age’s development of three structural innovations: the arch, the dome and the catenary, examining how they formed part of an attitude towards the symbolic representation of prevailing cultural ideas through the medium of architecture. Through examining specific examples in detail, the re-discovery of these ideas in Renaissance humanism will be covered, as will their translation into the modern age. 4. HIGHER, FASTER, FURTHER, FREER: The Architecture of Fordism will look at the twentieth century’s preoccupation with using industrial technique and method to alter established paradigms in spatial organisation. Detailed study will be made of the development of factory production, modulation, towers, large spans, trusses, vierendeels and cantilevers, all of which dealt with rapid population growth and urbanisation, and altered our prior imperative to occupy the ground. 5. KINETICS: Uncertain Times / Unsettled Architecture will look at architectural indeterminacy, and how the shift, around 1970, from the perceived certainties of a Fordist industrial economy into the uncertainties of a post peak-oil, post-Fordist service economy, led to a change from the idea of an effective, optimal architecture, into an architecture which aimed to be responsive, adaptable and anti-formalist. Detailed case studies of how this translated into ideas and realities of adaptable and kinetic architecture, both at the scale of building components and the scale of entire buildings, will be examined. Finally, it will examine new digital technologies and the possibility of self-adjusting and self-constructing architecture through robotics and biological control. 6. INDETERMINACY: McLuhan, Mass-media and Anticipating Change will continue the exploration of indeterminacy from lecture 5 into the urban scale, exploring architecture’s historical role as media and how the rise of mass-media has brought about a will for anticipating change in urban solutions such as metabolism, megastructure, and its contemporary variants. 7. APPEARANCES AND ESSENCES: The Individual and the Collective will examine the prevailing question of the dialogue between structure and skin in architectural design, drawing on Gottfried Semper’s nineteenth century writings on ‘revealing and concealing’ and making a comparative study framework through which to correlate architecture and fashion. Various architectural case studies illustrating multiple structure-toenvelope relationships will be discussed in detail and positioned relative to Semper’s thesis. 8. DIFFERENTIATION: Gymnastics, “Phoney disorder” and “Sublime uselessness” will examine the architecture of neoliberalism, looking at how market differentiation and positioning polarised the discipline into factions with different attitudes toward technology.

38


Reclaiming Urbanism / Reclaiming Modernism: Architecture, Space, and the Spatial Subject [Lorens Holm] The aim of the lectures is to build before the eyes and ears of students a critical theoretical frame for thinking architecture. The lectures draw on two principle sources, ideas about space found in architecture and the arts, ideas about subjectivity in psychoanalysis and philosophy. Space because it is the central concern of architecture, psychoanalytic theory because it is the most extensive and systematic contemplation of the human subject, the subject of architecture. Each week we examine an architect whose work has made a contribution to modernism, either because s/he was a modernist (Le Corbusier, Mies), an historian of modernism (Giedion), or a post-modern critic of modernism (Hadid, Tschumi, Koolhaas, Archigram). Although key concepts in psychoanalytic theory constitute the principle reference outside architecture – Freud’s development of the unconscious and Lacan’s critical re-reading of the Freudian unconscious as a form of social organisation – the lectures also draw on key concepts in philosophy, probably the most important of which is Hannah Arendt’s extended concept of the togetherness of people, but which will also include Hegel and the historical development of Spirit, Kant on the synthetic originality of space and time, Saussure and structuralist linguistics, Derrida and deconstruction. This is not the only theoretical frame for rethinking modernism, but it is a credible example of one. The students may adopt it in its present form, pick n’ mix it to fit their own position on architecture, or reject it altogether in favour of another one. The history of architecture is full of ruins. What the student is not allowed to do is walk away bereft of any frame. Students, then, are introduced to critical thinking in architecture that is not confined to isolated blips, but constitutes a well-formed edifice. With a bit of lateral thinking on the part of the students, the lectures should assist them in preparation for both their DRU, the 4th year studio project, and their Masters level studies. With these lectures as examples, the students should be able to think their way through a selfdirected innovative design project or series of projects that can be synthesised as an architecture thesis. Lectures will include discussions of: What architectural design research is, what creative practice-based research more generally is; elements of a research project including objects, aims, context, methods, questions; different forms of research, practice; How to develop your own research agenda that may – for instance – lead to a manifesto-like statement of intent (i.e., your critical reflection); How to develop and sustain your own discourse (your principle ideas, agendas, issues; above all your personal clichés, formal and aesthetic preferences, etc.); How site selection and brief writing (narrative) are elements of research; Case studies of creative practice research in architecture and/or the visual arts; Drawing as process; Writing and creative writing as part of the design process; What’s so stuffy about globalisation. At the end of the lecture course, the students will be asked to attend an introduction to the 5th year M.Arch. Thesis units and to select one that they think will be a good home for their interests. The content from at least one, more, or all of each of the Reclaiming Tectonics, Reclaiming Urbanism, and Reclaiming Modernism lecture courses is expected to be reflected upon critically, elaborated on and/or contested intellectually , and assimilated into your design work. This must be discussed in the Journal and made clearly identifiable. 39


Environment Lecture Course: [Tamer Gado] This lecture course will introduce you to urban environmental psychology, raising critical questions about the relationship between humans and their urban habitat, before moving on to unpick specific case study buildings, exploring how their environmental thresholds mediate the urban environment and explaining the science of environmental comfort and sustainability. Detailed content tbc.

Planning and Development Structures: [Dumiso Moyo / Kirsty Macari] Digital resources exploring the planning context (including recorded lectures and/or invitations to relevant live events etc.) will be made available through a section on the AR41001 blackboard.

Management Practice and Law: [Yorgos Berdos] Content and Coursework tbc. Content of the Environment and Planning and Development Structures courses is expected to be reflected upon critically, elaborated on and/or contested intellectually, and assimilated into your design work. This must be discussed in the Journal and made clearly identifiable. Management Practice and Law will be assessed through its own submissions.

‘Case-Studies’ [Mixed presenters] The lectures are an opportunity for staff to share with you their detailed knowledge of specific buildings or urban complexes which they have studied intently. Presenters will attempt to disarticulate their subject’s socio-political, urban, morphological, typological, formal, spatial, programmatic, technical and contractual ideas and ramifications. Through this process of reverse-engineering, it is hoped you will further develop your understanding of the symbiosis of cross-scalar and cross-modal thinking in architectural design. The following lectures will be delivered. They may be subject to change, or hopefully addition if time allows and more staff take the opportunity. 1. THE PRUITT IGOE MYTH [SCREENING]: In his 1977 book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. postmodern theorist Charles Jenks polemically used the demolition of the giant 32-building Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex in St. Louis, Missouri, designed by World Trade Centre architect, Minoro Yamasaki, to symbolise the death of modern architecture and to launch its replacement, postmodernism. In the Filmmakers’ words: “The world-famous image of its implosion has helped to perpetuate a myth of failure, a failure that has been used to critique Modernist architecture, attack public assistance programs, and stigmatize public housing residents. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth seeks to set the historical record straight. To examine the interests involved in Pruitt-Igoe’s creation. To re-evaluate the rumors and the stigma. To implode the myth.” (http://www.pruitt-igoe.com). Through rare archival clips and interviews with residents, the film offers essential insights into the politics and policies of large-scale urban renewal, and its effect on the lives of its occupants. 2. THE UNITÉ D’HABITATION, MARSEILLES: One month before he died, Le Corbusier stated “I have for 50 years been studying the chap known as ‘Man’ and his wife and kids. I have been inspired by one single preoccupation: to introduce into the home the sense of the sacred; to make the home the temple of the family”. Described by Professor Jacques Sbriglio as “among the world’s greatest architectural works”, Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation refuses to melt into history, its social innovation, architectonic substance and attitude toward mass housing and density being as relevant today as it was upon completion in 1952. Andy Stoane will draw on thirty years of personal obsession with this building, attempting to unpick its enduring global importance. 40


3. CUMBERNAULD MEGASTRUCTURE: Around 70 miles from this school lies a town, coveted in 1967 with an award from the American Institute of Architects, for the “most significant current contribution to the art and science of urban design in the western world”. The town centre at Cumbernauld, built as part of the Scottish New Towns programme, contained shops, supermarkets, a bus station, multi-level parking, pubs, restaurants, community facilities, a library, a town hall, a nightclub, a bowling alley, duplex penthouse apartments....yet this civic programme was not laid out in a pattern of streets and blocks, but was contained within a colossal concrete frame, connected via ramps escalators, bridges, and a hierarchy of connecting infrastructures navigating its covered spaces, open spaces and terraces. The frame was indeterminate, open and accessible 24 hours, with multiple ways in and out. Described by Rayner Banham as “…the most convincing paradigm we have of what an urban megastructure should be“, the town instantiated the urban concept of megastructure years before the projects of Kenzo Tange, Fumihiko Maki and Archigram, to whom it is often attributed. Andy Stoane first visited the megastructure as an architecture student in the late 1980s and has continued to do so ever since. He will unravel, through a series of personal reflections, its social, political and architectural history - an often tragic tale of epic proportions, through which architecture’s continual struggle to reconcile ideas of vision with political conciliation are played out quite literally in concrete form. 4. LAFAYETTE PARK, DETROIT: Professor Graeme Hutton will discuss the planning and architecture of this seminal urban complex, completed in 1959 as a collaboration between Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig Hilberseimer and landscape designer Alfred Caldwell. A descriptor will be issued at a later date. 5. PAVILION DE L’ESPRIT NOUVEAU: Lorens Holm will discuss the enduring significance of this 1:1 model on modern architectural thinking on cities. A descriptor will be issued at a later date. 6. THE NEW ART GALLERY, WALSALL: Helen O’Connor will discuss the building’s material, spatial and structural language, which challenged the accepted architectural orthodoxies of its time. Made at the outset of Caruso St John’s careers in independent practice, and won in open competition - the new art gallery represented an opportunity to embody complex ideas in physical form – the result is an intricate composition of architectural references from a west-midlands leather factory, to the Palazzo Vecchio, to an Elizabethan country house, the whole underpinned by a reading of Adolf Loos, via the Smithsons and enriched by an appreciation of radical, contemporary art practice. It’s a building which revels in its messy, post-industrial landscape and creates a new recognisable civic form in dialogue with which the existing. 7. THE BARBICAN: Andy Stoane will discuss his recent research into London’s Barbican Complex. Publicly funded and council-built, the Barbican was built as a drive to increase the residential population of the inner city in a time of urban retrenchment. An example of a “hybrid,” it contains a public arts-orientated “artificial” podium, with three forty-storey residential towers and a series of seven-storey residential slab blocks with a residential population of over six thousand in its fourteen hectare site - a population density three times that of most of central London. Its contains more than twenty different public programmes, two large residential squares and had a car free site. It took almost twenty years to build, bridging five changes in UK administration and seven different Prime Ministers, yet the Barbican was designed and constructed by a single firm of architects, Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, who controlled everything, from the disposition of its complex programme, to the nuances of its highly bespoke tectonic details, materials, fixtures and fitments.

41


T H E

J O U R N A L

The Journal is a vital piece of work, for both skill development and assessment. As implied in the name, it should be a continual reflection on your intellectual activities. However, it differs from some conventional journals in that it must eventually be concretised and presented as a conclusive, beautifully curated piece. It will contain a mix of research, survey, manifesto, hypothesis, and design information, all of which will continually evolve through the process of assembling it. In this way, it will simultaneously serve as a generative and representative medium. You will be required to submit journal drafts at various points through the semester. While these are punctuated moments of completion, the journal should be treated as an ongoing exercise in collecting, editing, and curating your work. Alongside your exhibitions, the journal will be used as a vital part of the assessment of your coursework. Effectively curated, it will allow examiners to see how the various pedagogical components of the course have been reflected on intellectually, elaborated, contested, subverted, or combined, and how the learning from them has been integrated into your design projects. It is therefore essential that the journal identifies and discusses what you have learned from all the course material, and that it is able to clearly demonstrate, through sophisticated editing and curation, your intellectual journey through the whole year. The journal will exist as a two volume set. It must contain text and images. It must be thoroughly considered editorially and graphically. It must be professionally bound and must have consistent size, format, binding and graphical language across both volumes. Its size and style are your decisions, but please consider very carefully how size and style affect communication. Remember, the journal and the pin-up exhibition are very different forms of media. The journal is sequential and narrative-driven, while the exhibition is immediate and impactful. You should embrace the communicative opportunities available within each.

The journal should be fully edited and re-curated conclusively at two key points:

1. At the end of semester 1 (submission of Volume 1).

This volume will include sections on:

Questions [your elaboration of the key studio questions]. Theoretical Research and Analysis [how these questions are nuanced by theory]. Empirical Research and Analysis [how these questions are nuanced by field(s)]. Construction of the Urban Hypothesis [your thesis on urban totality]. Testing the Hypothesis [through an urban strategy]. The logics for selection of fragments to further test the urban hypothesis at the architecture-scale].

2. At the end of semester 2 (submission of Volume 2).

This volume will include sections on:

Detailed testing of the Hypothesis at architecture-scale [testing through architectural resolution of the fragments]. Testing the Hypothesis at tectonic-scale [testing through tectonic elaboration of the fragments].

The text from both volumes of the journal must be submitted separately as a text document. This will be plagiarism-checked. Content from at least one, more, or all of each of the Reclaiming Tectonics, Reclaiming Urbanism (S1), and Reclaiming Modernism (S2) lecture courses is expected to be reflected upon critically, elaborated on and/or contested intellectually , and assimilated into your design work. This must be discussed in the Journal and made clearly identifiable. Content from the Environment and Urban Policy lecture courses is expected to be reflected upon critically, elaborated on and/or contested intellectually, and assimilated into your design work. This must be discussed in the Journal and made clearly identifiable. 42


The Manifesto and the Survey Robert Venturi and Denise ScottBrown’s Learning from Las Vegas (top), and Oswald Mathias Unger’s The City in the City, Berlin: A Green Archipelago (with Rem Koolhaas, Peter Riemann, Hans Kollhoff, and Arthur Ovaska)

43


Journal Excerpts. Left, volume 1; right, volume 2. HOUSING FUTURES THE PARADOX OF THE SPECIOUS CITY

STUDIO A: SHANGHAI SEMESTER 1 JOURNAL ELLIOT REILLY

1

12-16: Research: Field

24-41: Research: Theory

48-62: Field Case Studies

63-73: Shanghai Old Town

04

74-81: Repairing the Fabric

82-99: Repair and Revanchism

At the beginning of this journal I aim to provide an overview of our research field and convey my personal take on what I took from the field.

01

This chapter of the journal reflects on the theoretical study we, Studio A, conducted as a group to further enhance our knowledge on the theorists and architects who we believed were relevant to our project.

02

A brief insight into our research field, Shanghai and our study trip to London. I explore both cities and their economic background, giving an understanding as to why they look the way they do and operate in the manner in which they have for the past decades.

03

Having touched on Shanghai as a Global City. I begin to dive deeper into the existing Old Town Fabric. Asking the questions: Why are families being displaced? Where do they go? How bad are the conditions in which they currently inhabit?

The first of our strategic developments. Consisting of a 3 day long charette project in Shanghai, in collaboration with the students of Tongji University, we explored different approaches in tackling the issues of The Old Town.

As stated in the title of the last chapter, we developed our final strategy around the two main interventions. I will provide an in depth analysis into both interventions and how we developed our hypothesis.

Through my study of these architects and theorists, I will critically reflect on them at several points during my journal.

C

O

N

T

E

N

T

S

05

06

It is through answering these questions I will attempt to develop an architectural strategy to combat these issues.

章節 3

2

Shanghai’s Past and Expected Growth

The Old Town, which is the traditional urban core of the city is located in Huangpu District, Shanghai, The circular area of a 2km diameter, enclosed by Renmin

Road

and

Zhonghua

Road, houses 180,000 people. With people experiencing as little as 10m2^2. Located in the heart of Shanghai, the Old Town is the origin of Shanghai’s development from a seaside fishing port to a modern city. Drawing on our research of 1.01

continuity of fabric (mats), we can

1.02

morphological patterns involving make a clear correlation between the mat pattern and a specific form of political economy that involves collective operation and social collaboration.

MAPS BASE DATA FROM COLLABORATION WITH TONGI UNIVERSITY, SHANGHAI

15

1.06

1.05

1.03

1.04

14

MAPS BASE DATA FROM COLLABORATION WITH TONGI UNIVERSITY, SHANGHAI

MAPS BASE DATA FROM COLLABORATION WITH TONGI UNIVERSITY, SHANGHAI

17

16

HOUSING: A MASS PRODUCED ‘PRODUCT’ Along with Le Corbusier, there were

Corb and Fuller were trying to incorporate

Golden Lane Estate was a direct response

It is the task of this studio to bring this sense of collectivity and

other post-war architects keen to provide

the same means of production into the

to the destruction caused in that area of

community back into the heavily gentrified Shanghai Old Town. I will

mass produced, affordable housing in an

housing market, society was still unable

London during the War. Based on Corb’s

proceed to explore strategies in order to do so and explore different

attempt to solve the housing crisis. One

to accept the house as a ‘product’ in the

model of housing, Golden Lane Estate and

ways in which they can be implemented into the existing Old Town

being, Buckminster Fuller. Known for his

same way as a car. Unlike a car, housing

many other housing developments like

fabric. One through points of Repair throughout the fabric and one

technological driven designs, Fuller, like

was still craft based and without readily

it, were the last of their kind to exist as

through points of Revanchism.

Corbusier, wanted to design an affordable

available materials, housing could not be

the Keynesian era of economics came to

product that could be leased to families

mass produced. As well as the lacking

an end and a new era was introduced by

in the same way a car could. His most

technological advances pre-World War 1.

Margaret Thatcher with the introduction of the Right to Buy policy, which gave

prominent example being the Dymaxion House, designed in the late 1920’s, however

It was not until after World War 2, when

council tenants the opportunity to buy

it was not built until 1945. “The word

more

and

their house from their local authority. As

“Dymaxion” was coined by combining

materials were available, housing was able

a result, many developments originally

parts of three of Bucky’s favorite words:

to respond directly to the urgent need

provided by the local authorities became

advanced

technologies

and

of a post-war generation of families. This

run down and abandoned due to a lack of

ION (tension). The house used tension

came in the form of Le Corbusier’s Unite

government intervention. It was this exact

suspension from a central column or mast,

D’Habitation, Marseille, built between 1947-

moment that brought to an end the last

sold for the price of a Cadillac, and could be

1952 as well as many housing developments

Social Age of Architecture.

shipped worldwide in its own metal tube.”

in the U.K.

DY

(dynamic),

MAX

(maximum),

particularly in London. One

(J. Baldwin) Unfortunately, neither Corb’s

example from this keynesian era is Golden

It was this end of Social urgency in

Citrohan House or Fuller’s Dymaxion

Lane Estate, London. Built during the

architecture that brought about a new

House took to the market in the same way

1950’s-60’s, when social housing was at

era of architecture, one that has since not

Ford’s automobile did. But why? Although,

the top of the agenda for the country,

promoted the same sense of community.

fig. 2.16, Buckminster Fuller, Dymaxion House, 1945

fig. 2.15, Le Corbusier, Citrohan House, 1929

47

46

SANLIN CITY Similar to Zhongyuan Liangwan, Sanlin City is a product

still rife throughout the Old Town. The atavistic nature of this settlement is reminiscent

of the liberalisation and globalisation of the free market

of a traditional soviet social condenser, where those living there are forced into a

within the Chinese government during the 1970’s.

specific way of life without any real sense of collectivity. The same collectiveness that

Rather than high rise blocks, Sanlin was developed at a

comes naturally to the residents living in the existing Old Town fabric.

3.03 Sanlin City, Communal Loggia and Green Space 3.04 Sanlin City, Public Route 3.05 Sanlin City, Shared Garden Space for

smaller scale, with the aim of encouraging interaction

Residential Block

between residents. These residents being those who would have been moved there as a result of the gentrification throughout the city at the time. Although Sanlin promoted the idea of community living through the mix of residential and public, green space, its success was minimal and the lasting effect of this was apparent during our visit. My first thoughts upon arrival were mixed. When viewing the community from outside, it seemed very secluded and private. (the opposite of what it was intended to do) However, when walking through the development, it was clear there had been an attempt to provide the residents with mixed use programmes

of there programmes that the development lacked in

3.05

3.03

exercise equipment. It was, in my opinion, as a result

3.04

including: a community hall, communal gardens and

a sense of ‘community’. The same sense of community 53

06

52

88

180,000

REPAIR AND REVANCHISM

A few pages from one of 2019/20’s journals. Please note that, while the journal is a heavily curated document, you should show iterative design developmwent work in it. You can photograph and include more “messy” experimental material, which you should also keep in a portfolio for consideration by examiners.

Old Town residents

2

kilometer Fuxing Road

2

halves of a divided community

89

99

98

44


Journal [Volume 2]

RECLAIMING THE SHANGHAINESE COURTYARD by Elliot Reilly 1

6-13: Why Repair?

14-33: Case Studies

34-55: Outline Design Development

60-91: 3-Dimensional Matrix

04

92-101: Environmental Strategy

05

06

Chapter one is dedicated to providing an explanation as to why I have chosen the style of intervention I have and a brief over view of both Calum Ramsay’s and Mishell Parodi’s strategies.

01

Much like Volume 1, I have prioritised a chapter of this journal for detailed analysis of Case Studies.

Here I display my early design strategies through model making and sketches. I have analysed both in detail and drawn conclusions based on a variety of arrangements and conditions.

Upon making my final design decisions, I have used chapter 4 to procure my final drawings and illustrations which best convey my design based on the conclusions I arrived at in the previous chapter.

Chapter 5 is where I take the opportunity to display a series of environmental strategies and detailed drawings. Here, I break down conditions at an Urban scale as well as looking closely at conditions created by specific house types.

To conclude my journal, I use the last chapter to discuss my findings.

C

O

N

02

03

I have chosen a variety of projects from various locations with the intention of learning how other cultures approach similar situations.

T

E

N

T

S

102: Yield

章節 3

2

Hangzhou Housing Project,

In

Aerial View

order

to

develop

a more in depth

understanding on the current socio-political environment in China, I have analysed a number of contemporary examples of projects which have strived to maintain a similar sense of Collective living to that within the Old Town.

Although the pre-existing conditions differ between each project, the underlying issue is the same:

How can a modern typology reinstall a sense of Collective Living? A style of living which is fundamental to the success of the community.

案例分析 CASE STUDY: HANGZHOU

02 15

MODEL ARRANGEMENT

03

14

Matrix [Arrangement 2] It was crucial for me, in order to understand the spacial qualities of the space created as a result of the form of each house type, that I modelled each type as a solid at a scale of 1:100. In doing so, informed me of the overall form depending on the specific arrangement of types. Before planning out each house type I would allow the form of each arrangement to

Elevation variations Model Development (Floor by Floor)

determine each floor plan. This

particular

arrangement

successfully

aided me in focusing on what conditions worked well and what conditions did not work practically.

49

48

Although the Old Town fabric fails

to

provide

in

living

standards, the local residents are still able to maintain a collective style of living. The very style of living that is being destroyed through the act of government intervention. In an attempt to preserve this pluralistic way of life, I propose a Sub-Enlcave.

This Sub-Enlcave is based on a 3.2mX3.5m grid and will produce a series of conditions

that

will

be

repeated throughout the site in order to replicate the collective style of life in the Old Town.

65

64

First Floor:

SUB-ENCLAVE

Where, on the Ground Floor, I introduced

Consisting of 11 properties, each Sub-Enclave

collective

spaces

through courtyards, I adopt a similar

can provide housing to between 25-30 people.

technique on the First Floor. However,

With this dense arrangement, I was able to limit

it was crucial that I maintained a

the height of each Sub-Enclave to no more

sense of permeability on the vertical

than 3 storeys to maintain a level of collective

axis to allow for enough sun light

living that, in my opinion, would otherwise be

and to provide a visual connection

lost if I exceeded a height of 10 meters.

between the floors.

Ground Floor:

I achieved this connection through

The Ground Floor arrangement consists

the use of the Void. As an architectural

of 2 property types. With the living spaces

device, the void provides a sense of

orientated towards a central courtyard, both

openness as well as forming a visual

property types can take full advantage of a

relationship between the residents

shared space. These courtyards, although

on either side.

used by the residents of the house directly off of it, can also be accessed by residents of the

Providing

floors above in order to use the external stair

a

view

towards

the

perimeter of the Sub-Enclave are the

situated just off centre. Each stair then leads to

exterior patios off of the bedrooms

the floor above, providing sufficient access for

of each type. Each patio provides

those residents occupying the upper floors.

the bedrooms with both enough sunlight and privacy needed for a bedroom. 75

74

87

86

S U B - E N C L AV E C O U RT YA R D 73

72

45


T H E

E X H I B I T I O N S

Typically, you would be asked to present work as an exhibition at two key points in the year, toward the end of semester 1 and the final exhibition that forms part of the degree show in semester 2. These exhibitions ordinarily form part of your assessment. This year, there is of course uncertainty surrounding the organisation of physical exhibitions due to the necessity of social distancing, limited use of workshops, and difficulty in printing. In the event of no physical exhibitions taking place, contingencies, involving digital exhibition of work, will be implemented. You will be updated on this throughout the year.

I n s t a l l a t i o n

University of Edinburgh, 2018 MArch show exhibitions. Clockwise from top: 1, 2, 3: Island Territories V: Havana, Re-Making Islands, Dismantling Insularity. Tutors: Adrian Hawker and Victoria Clare Bernie. 4. Para-Situation [Calcutta / Kolkata]. Tutor: Dorian Wiszniewski.

46


C a r t e s i a n

University of Dundee, 2019/20 digital exhibition boards. Top: Tong Lichong, Metabolic Community. Bottom: Michell Parodi, Repair and Revanchism: The Lilong Revival.

While the opportunity to produce illuminating, and communicative physical installation work (as illustrated opposite) may not be possible due to spatial restrictions brought about by Covid19, we hope you will take the opportunity to rise to the challenge of producing equally stimulating exhibition material in the digital realm. While conventional panels will always be necessary to communicate Cartesian conventions(as above), you might also consider experimenting with video, film, animation or other digital processes.

D i g i t a l

https://www.flickr.com/photos/ volumina/3369914379/in/set72157615681580498/

https://studyarchitecture.com/blog/architecture-news/the-makers-arctic-lidar-video-installation/

https://www.pinterest.nz/ pin/221380137909156588/

47

Lucas Samaras, mirrored room 1966 https://www.pinterest.nz/ pin/559713059923727898/


Reading

R

E

A

D

I

N

G

Design Research: Fraser, Murray., Design Research in Architecture: An Overview, Abingdon, Routledge, 2016. Lucas, Ray., Research Methods for Architecture, London, Laurence King, 2016. Urban Theory: The following list is broad, diverse but non-exhaustive range of notable texts on urban theory. The texts include classics such as Lefebvre, contemporary discourse such as Brenner, and important specific categories too pervasive to ignore, such as gentrification, infrastructure and the housing crisis You should select a few to read by reading synopses and ascertaining relevance to your particular studio. Studio-specific reading materials will be included in your studio briefs. Coleman, Nathaniel, Lefebvre for Architects, Abingdon, Routledge, 2015. Kofman, Eleonore, and Lebas, Elizabeth. (Eds.). Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, Oxford, Blackwell, 1991. Castells, Manuel., Borja, Jordi. Local & Global: Management of Cities in the Information Age, London, Earthscan, 1997. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958. Brenner, Neil. New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question, New York, OUP USA, 2019. Brenner, Neil, Marcuse, Peter, Mayer, Margrit. (eds). Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City, Abingdon, Routledge, 2011. Simmel, Georg. The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903, http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Content_store/Sample_chapter/0631225137/Bridge.pdf Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1984. Harvey, David. Social Justice and the City, London, Edward Arnold, 1973. Marcuse , Peter, Connolly, James, Novy, Johannes, and Olivo, Ingrid, Potter, Cuz, and Steil, Justin. (Eds.). Searching for the Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice, Abingdon, Routledge, 2011. Kaminer, Tahl. The Efficacy of Architecture: Political Contestation and Agency, Abingdon, Routledge, 2017. Marcuse, Peter., Madden, David. In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis, London, Verso, 2016. Ryan-Collins, Josh, and Macfarlane, Laurie. Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing, London, Zed, 2017. Smith, Neil. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, Abingdon, Routledge, 1996. Hughes, Jonathan, and Sadler, Simon. (Eds.). Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism, New York, Architectural Press, 1999. Leach, Neil. (ed.). Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, Abingdon, Routledge, 1997. (particularly Jameson’s Is Space Political? and Leach’s Architecture or Revolution). Aureli, Pierre Vittorio. The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2011. Bunschoten, Raoul. Urban Flotsam: Stirring the City, Rotterdam, 010 Uitgeverij, 2000. Adorno, Theodor, and Horkheimer, Max. Dialectic of Enlightenment, London, Verso, 1997. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2002. Desimini, Jill, and Waldheim, Charles. Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2016. MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism, Scaling Infrastructure, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2016. Larkin, Brian. 2013, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology Vol. 42. Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhatten, New York, Monacelli Press, 1994. Koolhaas, Rem., Mau, Bruce. S,M,L,XL, Rotterdam, 010 Publishers, 1995. Essays: Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture; Bigness, or the Problem of the Large; What Ever Happened to Urbanism?. Project: Surrender, Ville Melun-Sénart, France, 1987. Koolhaas, Rem., Obrist, Hans Ulrich. Project Japan: Metabolism Talks, Cologne, Taschen GmbH, 2011. Hertweck, Florian., Marot, Sébastien. The City in the City, Berlin: A Green Archipelago, Zurich, Lars Müller, 2013. Venturi, Robert, Scott Brown, Denise, and Izenour, Steven. Learning from Las Vegas, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1972. Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1984. Rowe, Colin, and Koetter, Fred. Collage City, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1978.

48


Reading

Design Research: Fraser, Murray., Design Research in Architecture: An Overview, Abingdon, Routledge, 2016. Lucas, Ray., Research Methods for Architecture, London, Laurence King, 2016. Urban Theory: Please refer to AR41001 module guide and the coursebook. Architectural, Tectonic and Material Theory: You should select a few to read by reading synopses and ascertaining relevance to your particular studio. Studio-specific reading materials will be included in your studio briefs. Hartoonian, Gevork. Crisis of the Object: The Architecture of Theatricality, Abingdon, Routledge, 2006. Boom, Irma. Rem Koolhaas. Elements of Architecture, Cologne, Taschen, 2018.Paredes Maldonado, Miguel. Ugly, Useless, Unstable Architectures: Phase Spaces and Generative Domains, Abingdon, Routledge, 2019. Frampton, Kenneth. A Geneology of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form, Lars Müller, Zurich, 2015. Spencer, Douglas. The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance, London, Bloomsbury, 2016. Semper, Gottfried. Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, Or, Practical Aesthetics. Los Angeles, Getty Publications, 2004. Cairns, Graham. Reflections on Architecture, Society and Politics: Social and Cultural Tectonics in the 21st Century, Abingdon, Routledge, 2018. Forty, Adrian. Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture, London, Thames and Hudson, 2004. Hartoonian, Gevork. Ontology of Construction: On Nihilism of Technology and Theories of Modern Architecture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Coleman, Nathaniel. Utopias and Architecture, Abingdon, Routledge, 2005. Colomina, Beatriz. Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1996. Forty, Adrian. Concrete and Culture: A Material History, London, Reaktion Books, 2016. Drawing and Technical: Lewis, Paul and Tsurumaki, Marc. Manual of Section, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2016. Leupen, Bernard and Mooij, Harald. Housing Design: A Manual, Rotterdam, NAi Publishers, 2008. Schneider Dritte, Friederike and Auflage, Heckmann, Oliver and Schneider, Friederike. Floor Plan Manual, Housing. Birkhäuser, 2011. Atelier Bow-Wow (Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima). Atelier Bow-Wow - Graphic Anatomy 2, Tokyo, Toto, 2014. (and/or Graphic Anatomy 1) Waldheim, Charles, Desimini, Jill, Mostafavi, Mohsen. Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2016.

49


MODULE Module Guides are also contained independently

50


E GUIDES

within the relevant module sections of MyDundee.

51


AR41001 Urban Theory, Analysis and Strategy (30 Credits)

MArch Year 4 BA (Hons) Architectural Studies

Chora / Raoul Bunchonten, A Dynamic Masterplan for the City of Berlin

The City and its Social Field

Module Guide

‘Change life!’ ‘Change society!’ These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space . . . to change life . . . we must first change space. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

Content Overview A key part of the study of cities is the understanding of the theories that seek to explain the process of urban areas including those that deal with the spatial consequences of new forms of development through design research. This module explores the ideas of important urban thinkers and related theories to uncover a range of diagnoses for urban problems which have been offered in the literature, both historic and contemporary examples. The emphasis is both in the analytical power of these theories and their policy, planning and architectural implications. The module also examines the institutional structures and practices which are used in planning and managing cities and how these interventions impact on the fortunes of urban areas. Students study an existing city enclave within its wider context (physical, historical, economic, political) and generate strategic proposals. Aims    

To introduce students to urban theories, their relationship to and potential application in the development of urban strategy. Developing understanding of the historical, political social economic and physical context of the city, the relationships between people and buildings, buildings and the environment. To develop students critical understanding of the structure purpose and role of planning in the development process To facilitate and encourage skills in development and communication of creative strategies for urban design, how to identify key problems/issues and propose responses which address the city context at macro, intermediate and detail scales.

Method Using a combination of group work and individual work, through theoretical investigation, empirical survey, mapping, case study analysis and other forms of analysis, students will build up a picture of various phenomena affecting cities and their social fields. By operating across disciplinary boundaries and bringing research to bear on operational fields, they will test different methods of engagement with urban territories in accordance with their emerging interests and preoccupations. Through this process, students will glean critical intelligence which can be used to make hypotheses built on intellectually rigorous speculations on futures for urban environments. These hypotheses will be tested through a detailed urban strategy.

52


The course provides a pedagogical umbrella over the year, while individual studios provide disciplinary and thematic focuses. The first stage will be carried out in groups, whereas the stages thereafter will likely develop into individual work. However, the option of small groups or pairings is also maintained across the whole year. While work stages and modules can be identified separately in terms of learning outcomes and assessment, it is important to remember that successful projects are expected to synthesise the entire year’s work, without losing sight of any of the operational scales or modes.

Assessment Stages Semester 1

Students must submit and attend all assessments in order to pass the module

Stage 1 The beginning of research: Students will read, question, investigate, collect, discuss, debate, test, write, draw and model. As with any research studio, the work will be carried out collaboratively and tasks distributed among studio members. All data and other information will be shared and subgroups formed based on emerging interests and strains of enquiry. The operational studio work in this stage will be contained within the defined research contexts of the studio briefs, brought into focus through theoretical texts and case studies, upon which students will reflect and expand. Through expansive research and discussion with tutors and peers, students will begin to formulate critical views on the urban issues under investigation. Stage 2 In sub-groups, these critical views will be brought to bear on real urban fields. Using a combination of physical (where possible) and digital field work, students will comprehensively study both the totality of a city and fragments of it as defined by their own ongoing research. They will develop an understanding of the history, morphology, political, social and cultural operations in their urban fields and will analyse, key pieces of architecture existing as part of the socio-urban complexions. They will present and discuss new scenarios of various changes, interventions, issues and challenges, and will critique current development scenarios. They will begin to hypothesise on futures. Stage 3 Students will make detailed spatial propositions at an urban-scale (recommended scale 1:1250 - 1:500 maximum). Work from stages 1 and 2 will be synthesised and hypothesised through real sites in the urban field and will develop into operational strategies for engagement and intervention in the city and its cycles, processes and social operations. Stage 4 Building on the previous stages, students will begin to make fully resonant detailed instances (recommended 1:500 - 1:200) of a portion (a fragment) of their urban-scale strategy. By the end of the semester, this scale will demonstrate understanding of how urban life might operate in and around propositions, making a clear strategic argument for reciprocities between architectural space, form and social organisation.

City-scale thinking through models and drawings - sampling cubes (left) and transect analysis (right). Cube: Wang Lei, Qiaoyi Wu, Chao Wei, Changda Guo, Shuo Cheng, Jinghui Chen Photo: Neil Verow.

53


Learning Outcomes: Through a design journal and exhibition, students will demonstrate: All outcomes must be passed in order to pass the module

Assessed Outcomes

A knowledge and critical understanding of urban theory and its relationship to contemporary urban design, planning and management. An understanding of the impact of historical development, the physical, economic, social, political and cultural context on the shape of the contemporary city. An understanding of planning and development management structures and legislation, and the relevance of these to urban development. An ability to develop and communicate appropriate strategic responses to the problems of city enclaves and urban spaces: emphasising the relationship between people and place, and between buildings and the wider environment.

Assessment - Assessment type: 100% coursework. - Students must submit and attend all assessments to pass the module. - All components and outcomes must be passed in order to pass the module. Work will be assessed as follows: 50% on the group work completed at the end of stage 3 assessed through the exhibition. 50% on the individual work completed at the end of stage 4 – assessed through the exhibition and journal volume 1. The ability to use both media effectively will be part of the assessment. The exhibition, whether digital or physical, will contain group work (stages 1, 2 and 3) and individual work (stage 4). Both should be clearly identifiable and the exhibition should be curated to show the relationship between group and individual. The journal is an individually produced document,, however, the group work up to stage 3 will be assimilated into it. How it is assimilated will form part of the assessment. The organisation of the journal should clearly demonstrate how stage 4 work is set up to test the urban hypothesis from stages 2 and 3. The content from at least one, more, or all of each of the Reclaiming Tectonics and Reclaiming Urbanism lectures should be reflected upon critically, elaborated on and/or contested intellectually, and assimilated into the hypothesis. This will be discussed in the Journal and made clearly identifiable. Similarly, propositions are expected to build on and integrate content of the Environment and Urban Policy lectures.

The text from the journal must be submitted separately as a text document. This will be plagiarismchecked. Any work iterations, process work or other work not included in the journal must be kept and be made available for assessment.

A series of carefully orchestrated voids, from which the “average contemporary-everyday ugliness of current European-AmericanJapanese architecture” is banished, “irrigate the city with potentials” to stimulate different programmes and patterns of growth.

Hypothesising on an urban future of uncontrolled growth of cities: Mélun Senart New Town competition, OMA, 1987.

See: “Surrender, Ville Nouvelle Mélun-Senart, France, 1987” – in R. Koolhaas and B. Mau, SMLXL, Rotterdam, 010, Publishers, 1995,

54


Module Timetable

MArch Year 4 BA 9Hons) Architectural Studies AR41001 Urban Theory Analysis and Strategy Tutorials take place on Thursdays in studio. Group discussions and year leader lectures will take place on Mondays in the review space. For students working off-campus, video conferencing will be used. Live video-platform lectures will take place on Tuesdays (refer to the master timetable and detailed lecture content in the coursebook).

Week

General Activities

0

Thursday 10.00 - year introduction for BA Arch Studies students Friday 11.00 – library induction for BA Arch Studies students and new MArch students. Friday 15.00 – year introduction for MArch students. Monday 10.00 - studio assignment and meeting with tutors. Tuesday – lectures. Thursday – tutorials. Monday – group session with Humanities Leader. Tuesday – lectures. Thursday – tutorials. Monday – group session. Tuesday – lectures. Thursday – tutorials. Monday – group session. Tuesday – lectures + HUMANITIES ABSTRACT DUE. Thursday – tutorials. Monday – group session. Tuesday – lectures. Thursday – tutorials. Monday –group session. Tuesday – lectures. Thursday – tutorials. Monday – AR41001 FINAL REVIEW AND DRAFT VOLUME 1 JOURNAL SUBMISSION. Tuesday – lectures. Thursday – tutorials. Monday – group sessions. Tuesday – lectures. Thursday – tutorials. Monday – Assessment Workshop. Tuesday – lectures + HUMANITIES HALF-DRAFT SUBMISSION. Thursday – tutorials. Monday – group session. Tuesday – lectures. Thursday – tutorials. Monday – HUMANITIES THINKING MACHINE MID-REVIEW. Tuesday – lectures + Thursday – tutorials. Friday – FINAL VOLUME 1 JOURNAL SUBMISSION.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

55


Reading

Design Research: Fraser, Murray., Design Research in Architecture: An Overview, Abingdon, Routledge, 2016. Lucas, Ray., Research Methods for Architecture, London, Laurence King, 2016. Urban Theory: The following list is broad, diverse but non-exhaustive range of notable texts on urban theory. The texts include classics such as Lefebvre, contemporary discourse such as Brenner, and important specific categories too pervasive to ignore, such as gentrification, infrastructure and the housing crisis You should select a few to read by reading synopses and ascertaining relevance to your particular studio. Studio-specific reading materials will be included in your studio briefs. Coleman, Nathaniel, Lefebvre for Architects, Abingdon, Routledge, 2015. Kofman, Eleonore, and Lebas, Elizabeth. (Eds.). Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, Oxford, Blackwell, 1991. Castells, Manuel., Borja, Jordi. Local & Global: Management of Cities in the Information Age, London, Earthscan, 1997. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958. Brenner, Neil. New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question, New York, OUP USA, 2019. Brenner, Neil, Marcuse, Peter, Mayer, Margrit. (eds). Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City, Abingdon, Routledge, 2011. Simmel, Georg. The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903, http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Content_store/Sample_chapter/0631225137/Bridge.pdf Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1984. Harvey, David. Social Justice and the City, London, Edward Arnold, 1973. Marcuse , Peter, Connolly, James, Novy, Johannes, and Olivo, Ingrid, Potter, Cuz, and Steil, Justin. (Eds.). Searching for the Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice, Abingdon, Routledge, 2011. Kaminer, Tahl. The Efficacy of Architecture: Political Contestation and Agency, Abingdon, Routledge, 2017. Marcuse, Peter., Madden, David. In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis, London, Verso, 2016. Ryan-Collins, Josh, and Macfarlane, Laurie. Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing, London, Zed, 2017. Smith, Neil. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, Abingdon, Routledge, 1996. Hughes, Jonathan, and Sadler, Simon. (Eds.). Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism, New York, Architectural Press, 1999. Leach, Neil. (ed.). Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, Abingdon, Routledge, 1997. (particularly Jameson’s Is Space Political? and Leach’s Architecture or Revolution). Aureli, Pierre Vittorio. The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2011. Bunschoten, Raoul. Urban Flotsam: Stirring the City, Rotterdam, 010 Uitgeverij, 2000. Adorno, Theodor, and Horkheimer, Max. Dialectic of Enlightenment, London, Verso, 1997. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2002. Desimini, Jill, and Waldheim, Charles. Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2016. MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism, Scaling Infrastructure, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2016. Larkin, Brian. 2013, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology Vol. 42. Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhatten, New York, Monacelli Press, 1994. Koolhaas, Rem., Mau, Bruce. S,M,L,XL, Rotterdam, 010 Publishers, 1995. Essays: Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture; Bigness, or the Problem of the Large; What Ever Happened to Urbanism?. Project: Surrender, Ville Melun-Sénart, France, 1987. Koolhaas, Rem., Obrist, Hans Ulrich. Project Japan: Metabolism Talks, Cologne, Taschen GmbH, 2011. Hertweck, Florian., Marot, Sébastien. The City in the City, Berlin: A Green Archipelago, Zurich, Lars Müller, 2013. Venturi, Robert, Scott Brown, Denise, and Izenour, Steven. Learning from Las Vegas, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1972. Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1984. Rowe, Colin, and Koetter, Fred. Collage City, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1978.

56


57

EXHIBITION AND JOURNAL

An ability to develop and communicate appropriate strategic responses to the problems of city enclaves and urban spaces: emphasising the relationship between people and place, and between buildings and the wider environment.

EXHIBITION AND JOURNAL

EXHIBITION

EXHIBITION

EXHIBITION

An understanding of planning and development management structures and legislation, and the relevance of these to urban development.

An understanding of the impact of historical development, the physical, economic, social, political and cultural context on the shape of the contemporary city.

A knowledge and critical understanding of urban theory and its relationship to contemporary urban design, planning and management.

The Leaning Outcomes:

Where to demonstrate these?

S

M

M

A

[This is assessed against a demonstration of the quality and effectiveness of editing and executing graphical, textual and artefact-orientated communication and the ability to effectively edit and curate the work into an exhibition and journal with sophisticated understanding and exploitation of both media.]

Your communication – generative and representative. [Embedded in all LOs]. The work …

Your insight into how the strategy frames architectural thinking and your imaginative and thoughtful representations of this. The work is …

Your skills in using graphical and modelling techniques to explore and develop key pieces of the urban strategy – bringing highly skilful and insightful new focus on spatial, social and tectonic questions. The work is …

Your skills in assimilating the group/sub-group work into an individual narrative.

Your skills in developing a clear, rigorous and original strategy which will allow the hypothesis to be tested. The work is …

Your understanding of planning and development management structures and legislation, the formation of a critical position toward these, and your ability to build from this a robust hypothetical argument. The work is …

Your ability to productively synthesise this field work with other empirical research and your theoretical research, with originality and insight in moving toward an urban hypothesis. The work is …

Your understanding of the historical, morphological, typological, social and cultural operations of your urban field(s). The work is …

How your design work embeds thoughtful, original and insightful critical reflections on the lecture courses, elaborating and nuancing the content through discourse. The work is …

Insightful and resourceful ability to source, analyse and present highly relevant recognised urban theory and to assimilate it into a design hypothesis. The work is …

What, specifically, the submitted project information should demonstrate.

U

T

YEAR 4 | ‘OTHERWISE’ | S1 FINAL REVIEW THE CITY AND ITS SOCIAL FIELD V

E

fails to effectively communicate the project and does not succeed in properly curating an exhibition and/or journal.

Unsatisfactory

demonstrates satisfactorily edited and reasonably well executed graphical, textual and artefactorientated communication. There is a reasonable attempt to curate the work into an exhibition and a journal, understanding and exploiting both media.

D Satisfactory

Overall assessment of work submitted.

I

demonstrates good, effective, well edited and skilfully executed graphical, textual and artefact-orientated communication and a good ability to curate the work into an exhibition and a journal, understanding and exploiting both media.

C Good

R

V

demonstrates very good, effective, well edited and skilfully executed graphical, textual and artefactorientated communication and a very good ability to curate the work into an exhibition and a journal, understanding and exploiting both media.

B Very Good

E

E

LEARNING OUTCOME GRADE

LEARNING OUTCOME GRADE

LEARNING OUTCOME GRADE

LEARNING OUTCOME GRADE

Final grades and comments on assessment (continue on separate sheet as necessary).

W

URBAN THEORY, ANALYSIS AND STRATEGY GRADE

demonstrates excellent, effective, well edited and skilfully executed graphical, textual and artefact-orientated communication and an excellent ability to curate the work into an exhibition and a journal, with sophisticated understanding and exploitation of both media.

A Excellent

I

STUDENT ………………………………….………… STUDIO …..…. TUTOR …………………..…………


AR40007 Integrated Architectural Design (60 Credits)

MArch Year 4 BA (Hons) Architectural Studies

Right: Repair & Revanchism, The Fuxing Hybrid, Calum Ramsay, Dundee, 2019/20. Left: Locust Harvesting Chamber, Ehren Trzebiatowski.

Instantiation: Fragments and Sub-Fragments

Module Guide

“Space is social morphology: it is to lived experience what form itself is to the living organism, and just as intimately bound up with function and structure” Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space.

Content Overview Students will work within self-selecting studio design units to develop a fully resolved, integrated architectural design project; taking ideas through from the strategic to technical and programmatic resolution. Design tutorials and seminars will be supported by a series of technical and professional workshop exercises which develop students’ knowledge and understanding in these areas and aid them in applying this to their studio work. Studio work will be supported by case-study lectures which examine specific examples, highlighting the contextual, programmatic, technical and contractual issues which condition the development of buildings. In parallel a series of management, practice and law lectures and studio exercises develop students’ knowledge and understanding of the professional and legislative context of architecture Aims  To provide an opportunity for students to develop a comprehensive and integrated building design proposition, from strategic ideas to technical resolution, which responds and contributes to a complex urban context.  To underline the integrated nature of the ‘technical’ in design.  To develop students’ understanding of the professional and legislative context within which architecture is practiced. Method Operating within the intellectual armature developed through AR41001 & HT40003, students will test their urban hypothesis through instantiating it at the architectural and tectonic scales. They will make detailed elaboration of an architectural-scale fragment and a series of spatio-technical sub-fragments. Projects will demonstrate complete reciprocity between the different scales of the semesters. Students should demonstrate an understanding of how a single drawn line in the city can be charged with sociospatial content, and when scaled up, will contain multiple layers of tectonic information, serving to not only mediate that socio-spatial content, but to define architectural form. Work at the scale of architectural space, form and tectonics should resonate with work at the scale of the city and beyond. The entire body of work should form a consistent and robust design argument. An Otherwise?

58


Assessment Stages Semester 1+2

Students must submit and attend all assessments in order to pass the module

Stage 5 Students will develop a project brief and detailed spatial programme for an architectural-scale fragment of their urban hypothesis. They will iteratively undertake the detailed design of the fragment, making graphical and modelled representations showing spatial, social, formal and tectonic information. The work should demonstrate how it is derived from, and contextualised within, the escalating scales of the lineage of their design research. Stage 6 Students will further develop designs through a series of drawings and modelled artefacts that convey both spatio-tectonic thinking and elaborate structural, environmental and tectonic information at a high degree of resolution. The final presentations should demonstrate a spatio-tectonic use of technology and should not simply represent a techno-structural solution. Work should be sufficiently scaled to avoid generic, single layer or highly edited-down floor, wall, roof, and envelope articulation. Work will be assessed relative to ambition, control and precision of technique and material, and demonstration of tectonic sensibility. An environmental strategy should graphically put forward an argument on the place of architectural design in: 1. mediating issues of environmental damage; and in 2. how humans occupy the planet through the built urban environment.

Fragments and sub-fragments: Top:Tong Lichiong, University of Dundee, Metabolic Community, Shanghai, 2019/20; ESALA M.Arch 2018, photo of student degree show models. The Revanchist City and the Urbanisation of Suburbia [Tutors: Tahl Kaminer and Alex MacLaren]. Middle: Waheeda Rasool, University of Dundee, The Mirrored Hybrid, Shanghai, 2019/20; Solano Benitez, Edificio Alambra Bottom: Grafton Architects, sectional model of Bocconi University; unknown.

59


Learning Outcomes: Through a design journal and exhibition, students will demonstrate: An ability to: generate, apply and communicate a conceptual approach and appropriate architectural strategies based on understanding and analysis. An ability to: analyse and creatively resolve complex architectural programmes through a coherent process of research, speculation and critical evaluation considering the needs and aspirations of clients, building users, wider society.

All outcomes must be passed in order to pass the module

Assessed Outcomes

An ability to: make comprehensive and considered design proposals which respond to the urban context. An ability to: identify research and critically evaluate alternative technological strategies to enable the sustainable and appropriate integration of structure, environment, services, appropriate legislation, materials and construction, within a coherent and well-resolved design proposal. An understanding of: the architect’s role in the processes of procurement, cost control, construction and health and safety legislation, relevant building production and professional practice. An understanding of the nature of professionalism and the duties and responsibilities of architects.

Assessment - Assessment type: 100% coursework. - Students must submit and attend all assessments to pass the module. - All components and outcomes must be passed in order to pass the module. Work will be assessed as follows: 85% on the individual project work completed at the end of stage 6 assessed through the exhibition and

journal volume 2. The ability to use both media effectively will be part of the assessment. 15% on Management Practice and Law submissions.

The content from at least one, more, or all of each of the Reclaiming Tectonics and Reclaiming Urbanism lectures should be reflected upon critically, elaborated on and/or contested intellectually, and assimilated into the hypothesis. This will be discussed in the Journal and made clearly identifiable. Similarly, propositions are expected to build on and integrate content of the Environment and Urban Policy lectures.

The text from the journal must be submitted separately as a text document. This will be plagiarism-checked. Any work iterations, process work or other work not included in the journal must be kept and be made available for assessment.

60


LE

General Activities

B

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

The timetable will be confirmed prior to week 8.

P AT LE A TH SE E R R EF E A ER R O TO F TH TH IS E D MA O IN C U T M IM EN E T TA

Module Timetable Week

MArch Year 4 BA (Hons) Architectural Studies AR40007

61


Reading

Design Research: Fraser, Murray., Design Research in Architecture: An Overview, Abingdon, Routledge, 2016. Lucas, Ray., Research Methods for Architecture, London, Laurence King, 2016. Urban Theory: Please refer to AR41001 module guide and the coursebook. Architectural, Tectonic and Material Theory: You should select a few to read by reading synopses and ascertaining relevance to your particular studio. Studio-specific reading materials will be included in your studio briefs. Hartoonian, Gevork. Crisis of the Object: The Architecture of Theatricality, Abingdon, Routledge, 2006. Boom, Irma. Rem Koolhaas. Elements of Architecture, Cologne, Taschen, 2018.Paredes Maldonado, Miguel. Ugly, Useless, Unstable Architectures: Phase Spaces and Generative Domains, Abingdon, Routledge, 2019. Frampton, Kenneth. A Geneology of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form, Lars Müller, Zurich, 2015. Spencer, Douglas. The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance, London, Bloomsbury, 2016. Semper, Gottfried. Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, Or, Practical Aesthetics. Los Angeles, Getty Publications, 2004. Cairns, Graham. Reflections on Architecture, Society and Politics: Social and Cultural Tectonics in the 21st Century, Abingdon, Routledge, 2018. Forty, Adrian. Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture, London, Thames and Hudson, 2004. Hartoonian, Gevork. Ontology of Construction: On Nihilism of Technology and Theories of Modern Architecture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Coleman, Nathaniel. Utopias and Architecture, Abingdon, Routledge, 2005. Colomina, Beatriz. Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1996. Forty, Adrian. Concrete and Culture: A Material History, London, Reaktion Books, 2016. Drawing and Technical: Lewis, Paul and Tsurumaki, Marc. Manual of Section, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2016. Leupen, Bernard and Mooij, Harald. Housing Design: A Manual, Rotterdam, NAi Publishers, 2008. Schneider Dritte, Friederike and Auflage, Heckmann, Oliver and Schneider, Friederike. Floor Plan Manual, Housing. Birkhäuser, 2011. Atelier Bow-Wow (Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima). Atelier Bow-Wow - Graphic Anatomy 2, Tokyo, Toto, 2014. (and/or Graphic Anatomy 1) Waldheim, Charles, Desimini, Jill, Mostafavi, Mohsen. Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2016.

62


63

An ability to make comprehensive and considered design proposals which respond to the urban context.

An ability to identify, research and critically evaluate alternative technological strategies to enable the sustainable and appropriate integration of structure, environment, services, appropriate legislation, materials and construction, within a coherent and well resolved design proposal.

An ability to analyse and creatively resolve complex architectural programmes through a coherent process of research, speculation and critical evaluation considering the needs and aspirations of clients, building users, wider society.

EXHIBITION AND JOURNAL

EXHIBITION AND JOURNAL

EXHIBITION AND JOURNAL

EXHIBITION AND JOURNAL

The Leaning Outcomes:

An ability to generate, apply and communicate a conceptual approach and appropriate architectural strategies based on understanding and analysis.

Where to demonstrate these?

S

M

M

A

[This is assessed against a demonstration of the quality and effectiveness of editing and executing graphical, textual and artefact-orientated communication and the ability to effectively edit and curate the work into an exhibition and journal with sophisticated understanding and exploitation of both media.]

Your communication – generative and representative. [Embedded in all LOs]. The work as submitted . . .

Your ability to: 1. engage a higher resolution of design and to understand how this scale resonates with all the others previous; and 2. Use technology to intelligently and critically enable a global design argument: The work as submitted is . . .

Your environmental strategy, putting forward an argument on the place of architectural design in: 1. mediating issues of environmental damage; and in 2. how humans occupy the planet through the built urban environment. The work as submitted is . . .

Your formal articulation, developed and communicated through models, drawings and other means. The work is . . .

Your spatio-tectonic resolution, demonstrated through drawings able to show synthesiised technical and spatial development. The work is . . .

Your structural and tectonic thinking, developed and demonstrated through models, drawings and other means. The work as submitted is . . .

Your spatial organisation at the architectural scale, developed and communicated through plans, sections and other means. The work is . . .

Your development of a sophisticated programme resonant with your urban hypothesis and strategy. The work is . . .

Your appropriate selection of architectural-scale fragments able to instantiate relevant aspects of your socio-urban and socio-spatial thinking and able to intelligently test your own urban hypothesis. The work is . . .

Your iteratively developed response to various urban contexts – social, political, temporal, morphological, typological, technical. The work is . . .

Your contextualisation of the project within your own research / hypothesis / strategy, communicated through edited information from stages 1 – 4. The work is . . .

What, specifically, the submitted project information should demonstrate.

U

T

YEAR 4 | ‘OTHERWISE’ | S2 FINAL REVIEW FRAGMENTS / SUB-FRAGMENTS V

E

fails to effectively communicate the strategy and does not succeed in properly curating an exhibition and/or journal.

Unsatisfactory

demonstrates satisfactorily edited and reasonably well executed graphical, textual and artefact-orientated communication. There is a reasonable attempt to curate the work into an exhibition and a journal, understanding and exploiting both media.

D Satisfactory

R

demonstrates good, effective, well edited and skilfully executed graphical, textual and artefactorientated communication and a good ability to curate the work into an exhibition and a journal, understanding and exploiting both media.

C Good

Overall assessment of work submitted.

I

V

demonstrates very good, effective, well edited and skilfully executed graphical, textual and artefactorientated communication and a very good ability to curate the work into an exhibition and a journal, understanding and exploiting both media.

B Very Good

E

E

demonstrates excellent, effective, well edited and skilfully executed graphical, textual and artefact-orientated communication and an excellent ability to curate the work into an exhibition and a journal, with sophisticated understanding and exploitation of both media.

A Excellent

I

INTEGRATED DESIGN GRADE

LEARNING OUTCOME GRADE

LEARNING OUTCOME GRADE

LEARNING OUTCOME GRADE

Final grades and comments on assessment (continue on separate sheet as necessary).

W

STUDENT ……………………………………………… STUDIO …..…. TUTOR ………………..………………


HT40003 Architectural Humanities 4 (30 Credits)

MArch Year 4 BA (Hons) Architectural Studies

MArch Level 4: HT40003 Humanities 4: critical thinking, thinking machines, and architecture and cities in the history of ideas. Credit Rating

30

Module Leader

Lorens Holm

Date

August 2020

The principle tasks of 4th year Humanities will be to build a thinking machine, write with it, attend the lectures, and finally, write a short critical reflection that situates your design studio project within the history of architectural ideas. The thinking

Module Guide

machine is the main bit. It is usually a chance to build objects in the School’s Make Labs. This year, access to workshops will be COVID-limited, and we expect that most thinking machines will be digital. ‘Further expanding the already large class of Foucauldian apparatuses, I shall call an apparatus [dispositif] literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and – why not – language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses – one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primitive inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face.’ Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is an apparatus’ in What is an Apparatus and other essays (2006/2009) p.14. ‘Building always means to me research, sort of thinking around and questioning…. A few years ago, we opened a second firm alongside OMA called AMO, our research office, a kind of thinking factory…. it allows us an incredible freedom, to be able to think about things systematically, without immediately having to build. There’s a great need for architectural thought over and beyond specific projects.…propaganda for non-material values.’ Rem Koolhaas, in Hanno Rauterburg, Talking Architecture: interviews with architects (Prestel; Munich, 2008). This humanities module addresses RIBA criteria GC2 & GC3: GC2 – ‘Adequate knowledge of the histories and theories of architecture and the related arts and human sciences….’ GC3 – ‘Knowledge of the fine arts as an influence on the quality of architectural design….’

64 1


Curriculum 1. Humanities Design Research Units (DRU): Students work within thematic units defined by their unit teacher’s expertise and research interests on self-directed exploratory projects. The purpose of the DRU’s is to help each student define an investigative approach to, and a theoretical position in architecture, which may inform their current and future design projects, through writing and making. Each unit will define its own agendas, aims and objectives, sources, and set making exercises as appropriate. 2. Humanities Critical Reflection: No project exists in a vacuum. It exists in a design studio, a site, a city, within an architectural and urban culture and its conventions for representation, within a history. Students write a critical reflection upon their studio design projects that discusses how the project addresses the central issues or questions set by the studio; and positions the project in relation to contemporary practice and research, precedent artefacts and ideas. It should probably also explain how and why it relates to its site and broader urban/rural context (you may want to include an annotated site plan or diagrams). 3. Humanities Lectures on critical thinking in urbanism and architecture: The DRU Thinking Machine project and the critical reflection are supported by the humanities lectures in architecture and urbanism. They are divided into two streams: Reclaiming Urbanism: lectures on cities, societies, and the surface of the earth Reclaiming Modernism: lectures on architecture, space, and the spatial subject The aim of these lectures is to build before the eyes and ears of the students a critical theoretical frame for thinking architecture and cities. It also introduces the students to architectural research. The lectures draw on two principle sources, ideas about space found in architecture and the arts, ideas about subjectivity in psychoanalysis and philosophy. Space because it is the central concern of architecture, psychoanalytic theory because it is the most extensive and systematic contemplation of the human subject, the subject of architecture. Each week we examine an architect whose work has made a contribution to modernism, either because s/he was a modernist (Le Corbusier, Mies), an historian of modernism (Giedion), or a post-modern critic of modernism (Venturi, Hadid, Tschumi, Koolhaas, Archigram). Although key concepts in psychoanalytic theory constitute the principle reference outside architecture – Freud's development of the unconscious and Lacan’s structuralist re-reading of the Freudian unconscious as a form of social organisation – the lectures also draw on key concepts in philosophy, the most important of which are Hannah Arendt’s extended concept of the togetherness of people, but which will also include concepts from Hegel, Kant, Saussure, and Derrida. This is not the only theoretical frame for rethinking modernism, but it is a credible example of one. The students may adopt it in its present form, adapt it to fit their own position on architecture and cities, or reject it altogether in favour of another. The history of architecture and urbanism is full of ruins. What the student is not allowed to do is walk away unscathed. Research is defined as a process of exploration. You build a thinking machine to find something out. It may or may not solve a problem. We are interested in architectural research, i.e., research by architectural means, research by design, rather than research about architecture. Most of the architects and urbanists referred to in the lectures used their design practices to explore ideas and work through their consequences for space and occupation. The thinking machine is essentially – to borrow Rossi without permission – an analogous architecture, erected without the constraints – or without all the constraints – that bind architecture, like gravity, sites, budgets. With a bit of lateral thinking on the part of the students, the lectures should assist them in

65

2


preparation for both their DRU, the 4th year studio project, and their Masters level design studies. With these lectures as examples, the students should be able to think their way through a self-directed speculative design project or series of projects that can be synthesised as an architecture thesis. Lectures include discussions of: architectural design research, creative practice-based research more generally; elements of a research

-

project including objects aims context methods, questions; different forms of practice; how to develop your own research agenda that may – for instance – lead to a manifesto-like statement

-

of intent (i.e., your critical reflection); how to develop and sustain your own discourse (your principle ideas, agendas, issues; above all your

-

personal clichés, formal and aesthetic preferences, etc.); -

how site selection and brief writing (narrative) are elements of research;

-

case studies of creative practice research in architecture and/or the visual arts;

-

drawing as process;

-

writing and creative writing as part of the design process.

At the end of the lecture course, the students will be asked to attend an introduction to the 5th year M.Arch. Thesis units and to select one that they think will be a good home for their interests.

Outcomes On successful completion of this module students will demonstrate, through the self-directed design research units and the critical reflection essay, a knowledge and understanding of: •

the ways that the histories and theories of architecture and urbanism and the broader cultural context inform architectural design and thinking about cities;

and an ability to: •

use the analysis and appraisal of a wide variety of sources to generate, expand upon and enrich a clear argument, and to critically reflect upon their own work and the work of others;

speculate, test and communicate architectural ideas through a variety of appropriate techniques and media drawn from an understanding of architectural and fine art practice;

formulate a self-directed innovative design project or series of projects that can be synthesised as an architecture thesis.

66


Submission Requirements and Assessment 1. Humanities Design Research Units: 80%. You are organised into thematic humanities tutorial groups in which you are asked to produce a thinking machine and a 3000 word text as an iterative explorative thinking and making project. This object may relate to your architectural design; in which case it should lift your project out of the make-believe of a program and client, and ground it in the reality of ideas and materials. The text should situate the object within an architectural discourse, contextualising it within contemporary thought and practice. There can be no precise specification of what the thinking machine is, or even if it is singular, only that you should use it for thinking; we have called it a thinking machine, a machine for thinking architecture, in a nod to Le Corbusier’s machine for living in, Duchamp’s desiring machines, and Geddes folded paper diagrams. It might take the form of a model, a project detail, a drawing, a suite of photographs, a casting that explores a process of making, a howl of anguish (suitably recorded). This is a thinking-through-making exercise that runs in parallel to the development of the text, which is a thinking-through-writing exercise. Please refer to the assessment sheet for assessment criteria. Please refer to the year 4 calendar to confirm submission dates indicated below. For summative assessment students submit a designed bound publication which includes: Thinking through making: thinking machine Re-presentation/record of the object(s) or thinking machine(s) A 100 word statement of practice (how/why was the object made) Thinking through writing: text Abstract: Defines the intent and the territory in 100 words; Critical Discussion: Explores the idea, contextualises the machine in 3000 words. This text is not a report. This text is a thinking through writing project that is a component of a single heterogeneous exploratory project in form materials and ideas. References & bibliography & notes: includes buildings, artefacts, projects, art objects, and texts. Thinking through presenting: a beautifully designed PDF publication. The students will need to carefully photograph their object for inclusion in their Publication, with suitable attention to the lighting and depth of field, camera angles and background. Photography is a way of recording an object and exploring it. The Publication will be the final assessed piece of work. Indicative submission dates (to be confirmed in the course calendar): There will be 4 tutorials + a review of the thinking machine. A DRU project abstract (= 300 words + image) submitted the Friday of week 4 to your DRU tutor. Submission of draft Publication (= 1500 words + images) the Friday of week 8 to your DRU tutor. The thinking machine will be reviewed in cross unit critiques and exhibition in Week 11. Submission of the PDF Publication via MyDundee (tbc) for summative assessment, Monday of week 13. Full documentation of the thinking machine(s) and the process of making should be retained for inclusion alongside the exhibited portfolio see AR40007. Assessment will be based on the cogency, imagination, and insight of the machine and the text considered together in the publication. Assessment will also consider the production values of the publication. Please see the summative assessment sheet form.

4

67


2. Humanities Critical reflection: 20% A critical reflection upon the studio design project that discusses how the project addresses the central issues or questions set by the studio. You are also asked to critically position your project in relation to contemporary practice and research, and in particular position it in relation to precedent artefacts (buildings, art, machines,.) and ideas. It should outline key preoccupations and these might relate to site and broader urban context, programme and technical resolution, it might include discussion of how your DRU study relates to your integrated design project. This paper should be 1500 words, and should include images and captions, diagrams, details, plans, etc. as appropriate. Assessment will be based on the insight, originality, and rigour with which it sets out the critical issues and conditions within architecture and the many and myriad contexts that the project addresses. Consideration will also be given to its ‘production values’: the graphic design and typography, clarity, grammar, etc. of the document. my dundee.ac.uk submission for summative assessment: Monday week 27 N.B the critical reflection should also be bound into your Integrated Design Report, forming the introduction. Please see AR40007 and the design report template available through my dundee.ac.uk for further details

A minimum of a pass grade D3 in both submissions is required to pass the module. Materials / Equipment Required Working in the studio will be COVID-limited and will depend on the approach of each DRU group and individual project, but will require; -

Preparation of sketches/sketchbooks on paper and trace, size as appropriate to the project. Students should be in the habit of keeping a sketchbook of ideas. Students should be in the habit of developing their ideas with the precision we expect of architecture, through successive iterative trace overlays.

-

Technical drawing boards (some AO boards are provided in the studio) – and drawing equipment

-

Model-making equipment and materials. Students are strongly encouraged to use the now extensive Matthew Building making facilities. These facilities will be COVID-limited. Students should expect the focus this year’s work to be digital or predominantly digital.

-

Digital media and computing equipment (computers are provided in the CAD suite (students are expected to have laptops in the studios)

-

A facemask.

Preparation / Support 4 DRU Tutorials beginning on or about week 3: Dates and times – by arrangement with the unit teacher. Preparatory and support materials at the discretion of the unit teacher. See the year 4 calendar for tutorial dates.

Timetable & Blank Summative Assessment Sheet Published separately on my dundee.ac.uk.

68

5


69


F U L L

T I M E T A B L E S

Semester 1 WEEK AR41001 0

HT40003

AR40007

Thursday 10.00 - year introduction for BA Arch Studies students Friday 11.00 – library induction for BA Arch Studies students and new MArch students. Iain Gillespie. Friday 15.00 – year introduction for MArch students.

1

Monday 10.00 - meet year leader / studio allocation. Online and face to face. Level 6 review space. Tuesday 10.00 lecture Lorens Holm. Thursday – Meet tutors / tutorials (Urban Theory, Analysis and Strategy).

2

Monday10.00 – meet Humanities leader. Lorens Holm. Tuesday 10.00 lecture Lorens Holm. Tuesday 11.00 lecture Tamer Gado. Thursday – tutorials (Thinking Machine).

3

Monday – group session. Andy Stoane. Online and/or face to face. Level 6 review Space. Tuesday 10.00 lecture Lorens Holm. Tuesday 11.00 lecture Tamer Gado. Thursday – tutorials (Urban Theory, Analysis and Strategy).

4

Monday – group session. Andy Stoane. Online and/or face to face. Level 6 review Space. Tuesday 10.00 lecture Lorens Holm. Workshop Inductions for new Y4 students - Wednesday 28th October, 9.15-12.15 Tuesday 11.00 lecture Tamer Gado. Thursday – tutorials (Urban Theory, Analysis and Strategy)

5

Humanities abstract (300 word + image) due.

Monday – group session. Andy Stoane. Online and/or face to face. Level 6 review Space. Tuesday 10.00 lecture Lorens Holm. Tuesday 10.00 lecture, Dumiso Moyo / Kirsty Macari. (Asynchronous). Thursday – tutorials (Thinking Machine).

6

Monday – group session. Andy Stoane. Online and/or face to face. Level 6 review Space. Tuesday 10.00 lecture Lorens Holm. Tuesday 10.00 lecture, Yorgos Berdos. Thursday – tutorials. (Urban Theory, Analysis and Strategy).

7

Monday (or other day to suit studio) – FINAL REVIEW OF URBAN THEORY, ANALYSIS AND STRATEGY PROJECT inc SUBMISSION OF JOURNAL VOLUME 1 DRAFT Tuesday 10.00 lecture Lorens Holm. Tuesday 10.00 lecture, Yorgos Berdos. (Asynchronous). Thursday – tutorials (Urban Theory, Analysis and Strategy / Integrated Design).

8

Monday – group sessions. Andy Stoane. Online and/or face to face. Level 6 review Space. Tuesday 10.00 lecture Lorens Holm. Tuesday 10.00 lecture, Yorgos Berdos. (Asynchronous). Thursday – tutorials (Thinking Machine).

9

Monday – group session. Asessment Workshop. Jim Robertson & Helen O’Connor. Tuesday 10.00 lecture Lorens Holm. HUMANITIES 1500 WORD HALF DRAFT SUBMISSION. Tuesday 10.00 lecture, Yorgos Berdos. (Asynchronous). Thursday – tutorials (Integrated Design).

10

Monday – group session. Andy Stoane. Online and/or face to face. Level 6 review Space. Tuesday 10.00 lecture Lorens Holm. Tuesday 10.00 lecture, Yorgos Berdos. (Asynchronous). Thursday – tutorials (Integrated Design).

11

Monday – Mid REVIEW OF HUMANITIES THINKING MACHINE (this is work in progress, final submission is in week 17) Thursday – tutorials (Integrated Design). Friday - FINAL SUBMISSION OF JOURNAL VOLUME 1_____________________________

70


Semester 2 WEEK HT40003

12

Commencing 18 January

13

Commencing 25 January

14

Commencing 1 February

15

Commencing 8 February

16

Commencing 15 February

17

Commencing 22 February

18

Commencing 1March

19

Commencing 8 March

20

Commencing 15 March

21

Commencing 22 March

22

Commencing 29 March

AR40007

Monday - 11.00, Andy Stoane, Year Meeting for all students (Collaborate Course Room). Tuesday 10.00, lecture Lorens Holm, Reclaiming Modernism series. Thursday – introduction/presentation to Richard Dundas (tectonics consultant tutor). Thursday – tutorials (Humanities Publication). Monday 11.00 – whole year meeting + lecture, Andy Stoane, Reclaiming Tectonics series - no5. Monday - Richard Dundas, tutorial 1 for Studios A, B, C. Tuesday 10.00, lecture Lorens Holm, Reclaiming Modernism series. Tuesday 11.00. lecture Tamer Gado (recorded) TBC Thursday – tutorials (Integrated Design). Monday 11.00 – whole year meeting + lecture, Andy Stoane, Reclaiming Tectonics series- no 6. Monday - Richard Dundas, TECTONICS SESSION 1 for Studios D, E, F. Tuesday 10.00, lecture Lorens Holm, Reclaiming Modernism series. Tuesday 11.00, lecture Tamer Gado (recorded) TBC Thursday – tutorials (Humanities Publication). Tuesday 10.00 lecture Lorens Holm, Reclaiming Modernism series. Tuesday - 11.00, lecture Tamer Gado (recorded) TBC Thursday – tutorials (Integrated Design). Friday - Richard Dundas, TECTONICS SESSION 2 for Studios A, B, C. Monday - 11.00, lecture, Graeme Hutton, Case-Studies Series. TBC Tuesday - 10.00, lecture Lorens Holm, Reclaiming Modernism series. Thursday – tutorials (Integrated Design). Friday - Richard Dundas, TECTONICS SESSION 2 for Studios D, E, F. Monday - 11.00, whole year session, Andy Stoane. Monday – 11.00, lecture, Lorens Holm, Case-Studies Series. CCTV, OMA. Monday - Richard Dundas, TECTONICS SESSION 3 for Studios A, B, C. Tuesday - 10.00. lecture Lorens Holm, Reclaiming Modernism series. Thursday - Richard Dundas, TECTONICS SESSION 3 for Studios D, E, F. Thursday – tutorials (Integrated Design). Friday – FINAL SUBMISSION OF HUMANITIES PUBLICATION (3000 word text + thinking machine) Monday 11.00, lecture, Helen O’Conner, Case-Studies Series. TBC or whole year session, Andy Stoane. Tuesday - 10.00 lecture Lorens Holm, Reclaiming Modernism series. Thursday (or other day to suit studio) – INTERIM INTEGRATED DESIGN REVIEW (FRAGMENTS) Friday - Richard Dundas, TECTONICS SESSION 4 for Studios A, B, C. Monday - 11.00, whole year meeting + lecture, Andy Stoane, Case-Studies Series. A Gerrymandered Estate. Tuesday - 10.00, lecture Lorens Holm, Reclaiming Modernism series. Thursday – tutorials (Integrated Design). Friday - Richard Dundas, TECTONICS SESSION 4 for Studios D, E, F. Monday - 11.00, Yorgos Berdos. Live MP&L event. Provisional - dateTBC NOTE: MP&L DEADLINE TO BE CONFIRMED BY MP&L STAFF Tuesday - 10.00, lecture Lorens Holm, Reclaiming Modernism series. Thursday – tutorials (Integrated Design). Friday - Richard Dundas, TECTONICS SESSION 5 for Studios A, B, C. Tuesday - 10.00, lecture Lorens Holm, Reclaiming Modernism series. Thursday – tutorials (Integrated Design). Friday - Richard Dundas, TECTONICS SESSION 5 for Studios D, E, F. Monday - 11.00, whole year session, Andy Stoane. Thursday (or other day to suit studio) – FINAL INTEGRATED DESIGN REVIEW (FRAGMENTS AND SUBFRAGMENTS) Friday - DRAFT SUBMISSION OF JOURNAL VOLUME 2 BREAK BREAK BREAK

23

Commencing 26 April

24

ALL TIMETABLING IN WEEKS 23, 24, 25 & 26 IS SUBJECT TO FINAL CONFIRMATION

Thursday - Final Studio Pin-up + Powerpoint Journal Review Friday – FINAL SUBMISSION OF HUMANITIES CRITICAL REFLECTION Monday - Submit Final Journal - both volumes. (Final Submission).

Commencing 3 May

25

Monday – Exhibition/Portfolio Complete (Final Submission).

Commencing 10 May

INTERNAL EXAMINATION

26

EXTERNAL EXAMINATION

Commencing 17 May

71


72


“If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightening to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself”

“INSPIRATION IS FOR AMATEURS - THE REST OF US JUST SHOW UP AND GET TO WORK.” Chuck Close

73


74


Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.