Studio Goes Global From Home +
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BUCKY’S SPACESHIP EARTH RE-BOOT
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Dymaxion projection showing locations of our virtual workshops and studio collaborators.
Notes on Pandemic Teaching
Multiple Urban Constellations
Derek Hoeferlin, Associate Professor and Chair, Landscape Architecture and Urban Design
Jonathan Stitelman, Senior Lecturer Studio Lead & Editor
From Places journal, April 5, 2020
For the past several years, at our urban design program, we’ve been running a Global Urbanism Studio. It’s been a fantastic opportunity for students to experience such complex cities as Johannesburg and Mexico City—but when I started as chair last fall, I had a gut instinct that the whole concept of the studio needed a reboot, especially in these precarious and divisive political times. I started to question the merits of traveling studios in these days of hardened borders and pervasive xenophobia. And more, I started to wonder: do our schools of design need a new ethics of global engagement? The rules of the (international) game seemed to change overnight after the 2016 election here in the United States. How does a global pandemic further complicate the fragile system? Now, looking ahead to a world that’s post-COVID-19, how can we rewrite the rules of engagement for our students, for our profession? Since our summer traveling studio cannot travel this summer, what if we optimistically start a new experiment that is ambitiously international in scope even as it remains rooted, or sheltered in place, in our school in the middle of the North American continent? I’m envisioning a global urbanism studio that re-energizes Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion World Map—a new studio that radically engages all seven continents on Bucky’s Spaceship Earth. Now is the moment to galvanize our international network to develop new pedagogical models that will deliver the best virtual studio possible for our students, and to create teaching models that reconnect systems, transmit new ideas, and encourage greater collectivity.
The Global Urbanism Studio pivoted, like everything, in the first weeks of March 2020. I had been in the planning phases of the annual studio—which marks the final core studio for students in our Master of Urban Design program—with associate professor Derek Hoeferlin, chair of landscape architecture and urban design, when the global pandemic turned the world upside down. In past years, we travelled far afield, guided by the belief that experiencing other cities and seeing how life unfolded across many cultures made for the best design training. Now, however, we were presented with the challenge of delivering a comparable design studio from the safety of home. We re-conceptualized the 2020 Global Urbanism Studio to be run completely remotely. Instead of trundling across the globe together, we assembled an amazing group of designers and educators who brought the world to us. As a visiting assistant professor that summer, I led the studio, which worked with an international network of designers— representing all of the continents plus the oceans— who introduced us to new cities and design processes. The workshops were a space to directly respond to the pandemic’s impact on specific contexts in those regions, and to open the possibility of addressing other, already simmering challenges facing urbanism around the world, including climate change. Teaching and learning abroad brings a certain immediacy to the work. The reason we travel is to respond to the place. For example, students’ experiences navigating the dense labyrinth of Nakasero Market in Kampala, Uganda for the Global Urbanism Studio in the summer of 2019 shed light on the complex and highly orchestrated social
SUMMER 2020/2021
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Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts
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GLOBAL URBANISM STUDIO
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STITELMAN HOEFERLIN BERNSTINE ADENGO AHIMBISIBWE GMÜR SCHULZE CARTER KOKORA CORREA DAVIDSON SHEPPARD WHITE KIM
Contents
Notes on Pandemic Teaching. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Hoeferlin Multiple Urban Constellations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Stitelman Open Air. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Stitelman Summer 2021 Studio: Open Air Markets. . . . . . . . . 3 Summer 2020 Studio: Strong & Weak Systems . . . . 4 Dispatch from Kampala. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Adengo, Ahimbisibwe & Stitelman Market Photos: Kampala. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Tony Blackwolf Market Photos: Zurich. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Jurg Schoenburg Dispatch from Zürich | 2020. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Gmür Dispatch from Zürich | 2021. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Gmür Dispatch from New York & Hong Kong . . . . . . . . 16 Kokora & Carter Dispatch from New York. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Correa & Dobrowalski Dispatch from Brisbane. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Bowstead, Davidson, Hill, Gausachs Dispatch from the Toronto. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Sheppard & White Dispatch from the Oceans. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Kim Acknowledgements & Additional information. . . . 28 interactions that had to be recognized in any design speculation. In light of the pandemic, we trained our spotlight on our own surprise, in real time, at the novel disruptions to daily life in cities around the world. In this case, the immediacy was all around us, and the questions of how cities would respond, adapt, and endure were at the forefront of our minds. What made this studio different than previous years was that we were in the midst of a culture of not knowing, watching our own cities and the ways we navigate them change before our very eyes. When leading a
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