YEAR 3 SEMESTER 1

Joseph Lim Design 3 Year Leader, Unit 1 Leader

Ruzica Bozovic Stamenovic Unit 2 Leader Design 3 focuses on structure and form made from component elements. But architecture is more than a collection of forms sitting on landscapes. It is also an expression of the aspirations of people at a particular point in time.

When Fumihiko Maki proposed that “architecture must not only express its time but survive it”, he was concerned with the rigid outcomes of modernist urban planning, epitomised by the fate of the troubled Pruitt-Igoe housing project in Missouri, which became an iconic symbol associated with failed architecture, public policy and society. Creating alternative urban forms better suited to evolving societies is an ongoing experiment in exploring the relationship between form and its context, and the connection between architecture and the city. In his Notes on Collective Form, Maki valued not the stylistic aspect of form itself, but rather, its ability to accommodate spontaneity and growth and to move to new states of equilibrium, while maintaining visual consistency and order over time. Because the outdoor spaces in between a building and the city are thresholds of experience, they are as important as spaces inside the built forms. Hence compositions must not focus on form alone, but also on the spaces between forms, the nature of their linkages and in the interior spaces of each form.

The idea of group form cannot be simplified into “singles and multiples” as elements of replication. To avoid arbitrariness in compositions, students should not look at shapes alone, but seek to understand an ordering principle, or a schema, with which to establish connections with component forms and their spaces in between. Such a schema would then present a geometric framework with which to generate form, space and structure in meaningful site relationships. In Design 3, studio participants will apply this perspective in investigating how a small urban project may be composed legibly with schemas that relate structural order with spatial hierarchy.

Image: Study from a research project by Joseph Lim