Phase I Students Research: Literature + Reference Projects

Fig. 1: Studio summer 2020 - meeting digitally

// DESIGN-RESEARCH DURING AND AFTER CORONA

Riccarda Cappeller

The urban design and research studio was part of an ongoing investigation and dialogue on new concepts and tools in architectural urbanism that addressed the reconstruction of urban performativity within and after the current Corona crisis. It became increasingly clear that the crisis was not only deeply affecting the economic system and the structures of social life, but also the very dynamics and concepts of everyday life. Thus, reconstruction addresses the notion of public space, of urban networks that trigger community, of places that foster innovation, through spatial and material atmospheres, connectivity, and performativity. Furthermore, we believe that the increased role of digital social interaction in the crisis will provoke a remarkable material-digital reconfiguration with deep consequences to think, live, and design urban space.

This shift was inherent in the challenges of dealing with the impossibility to meet for the introduction, an excursion and for further discussions during the development of the design projects. While the amount and quality of online researched and gathered material were astonishing, it also clearly showed that an online representation of a spatial situation cannot replace the actual, bodily experience of fieldwork and discovering it in situ. Nevertheless throughout the semester it was apparent that the online strategies across the world also offered new possibilities and access to information as well as it facilitated a more direct international exchange. The studio, due to the situation, was organised in a distant teaching and learning model, specifically targeted for the project study concept and codeveloped further during the work. It included not only digital communication in individual mentoring and group workshops, but aimed at a digital work process and novel forms of outputs in videos and interactive formats. Thought as a design research project, the active knowledge creation through the combination of thematic research, the understanding of theoretical concepts and the capturing of the essence of global urban design projects as well as the active examination and exploration on new tools and methods was fostered. It brought the analysis on an existing space and the for it newly designed ideas closer together and demanded a questioning of each step, which lead to a more critical approach towards the design. Also the knowledge production during the analysis- and later the design phase was deliberately directed towards an interdisciplinary connection and variety of perspectives, increasing potential sites where knowledge could be created, liking them through networks and understanding the outcomes as a result from a negotiation process, that also pointed out the communication of the research as crucial.

Through interactive data mapping on GooogleMaps, a virtual meeting with city experts and users of the projectable spaces as well as an online workshop format to think over the main conceptual aspects of the emerging projects and the ways of telling them as narratives, where unusual ways to approach the spaces and encouraged new formats of teaching and learning throughout the semester.