fall 2005
ARC 560R/696:
Housing and Urbanism
Course Description
One of the major challenges of current critical thought on housing is the colonization of urban territories. Within the next 20 years there will be an increased demand for urban housing, along with a paradigm shift from a mass oriented - mainly social - to a consumer oriented, flexible and individualized architecture, a real alternative to suburban living. This change will have enormous consequences for urbanization and will give new identity to the concept of density. No longer do we know for whom we are building. There is no general lifestyle or clear social pattern anymore. Housing must be flexible.
Understood as the primary material of the urban situation, housing may also be thought of as an open combinatory system. It is the result of complex factors, a set of relationships both tactical and strategic, revealing the capacity of contemporary culture to transcend the episodic while working toward a structural framework on a scale that demonstrates an awareness of the specific territory generated around it. Using housing as a strategic vehicle for exploring the major challenges to the production of urban landscape, the studio will investigate the relationship between the spatial and technical formation of the unit in particular, and the investigation of urban orders established by urban form. Drawing from the extreme circumstances and segregation of cities in the contemporary world, the studio will explore the connections between the physical interventions, social processes, architectural design and the redesigning of new urban situations. Particular attention is paid to questions of density, identity, locality and territorial systems.
The studio will consider these questions, while constructing scenarios for urban living that respond to the changing demographics and structure of the contemporary city and its territorial networks. If we are indeed entering the first metropolitan century, then we must begin to develop strategies of colonization that respond to these new conditions. Housing, the great promise of modernity, is still an unfinished project.
This course is the required introductory studio for students enrolled in the Graduate Program in Urban Design. Additional space is available for students enrolled in advanced design.
Required Texts
DENSITY: New Collective Housing; a + t editions; ed., Mozas, Javier and Per, Aurora Fernandez
Community and Privacy: Towards a New Architecture of Humanism; Chermayeff, Serge and Christopher Alexander