URBAN DESIGN Open Studio Christoph Hadrys
The Urban Design course is the design intensive masters for alternative urbanisms at the University of East London. It is set up to develop both intellectual and practical skills for urban designers and architects. Through interrelated design and theory projects, we search for alternative solutions to complex urban conditions. The course sets out to explore and develop new forms of urban practice in cities undergoing critical change, where conventional thinking struggles to respond to uncertainties and the necessity for imaginative thinking. It aims to prepare students to work with different geographical settings, urban agendas and economies through design projects. We engage directly with communities, sites and contexts, to be able to develop both practical and innovative urban designs, from the scale of regions and cities, all the way through to neighbourhoods and building scales. This approach is informed by local and international urban practice, but also emphasizes students‘ individual interests, abilities and intuition, to explore and develop new forms of urbanism. Asking questions, like who is building cities and how to build cities, allows us to open our understanding about finer visible and invisible forces. We research diverse methodologies, like the use of tolerances and time-lines, to enable more dynamic and generative urban processes, allowing a much wider range of people to take part in building cities.
The course provides a platform for the individual student to develop an expertise and an approach to sustainable urban design through the development of urban design strategies and research. As more and more emphasis is put on the importance of sustainable developments by governments and professional bodies, such knowledge and skills will be of increasing usefulness to the students in their professional lives. The programme prepares for work in the public as well as in the private sector. The masters course has two fully integrated parts: The design intensive studio and the theory component comprising Masters and Professional MArch (ARB/ RIBA Part2) students. The Urban Design course welcomes students as fellow innovators in a programme that is both visionary and hands on in seeking to develop urban futures that are sustainable, distinctive and enjoyable.
“The neatness of architecture is its seduction; it defines, excludes, limits, separates from the “rest” - but it also consumes. It exploits and exhausts the potentials that can be generated finally only by urbanism, and that only the specific imagination of urbanism can invent and renew “ Rem Koolhaas , SMLXL
