The Advanced Urban Design Studio III is part of a multi-year joint studio collaboration. MSUD students, together with students from architecture, landscape architecture, and dual-degree students in urban design and community and regional planning are collaborating, on a series of transdisciplinary studios focusing on the region of Andalucía. A richly layered cultural landscape with deep historical connections to the Mediterranean, Latin America, and the Texas landscape, Andalucía offers students an opportunity to work on multi-scalar analysis and investigations of the critical relationships between architectural production, urban situations, and the environmental implications of hot climates.
UTSOA urban design and architecture faculty are working in collaboration with faculty from Columbia University and the Universidad de Sevilla, Spain, to undertake projects situated in three important Andalucian cultural centers: Seville, Granada, and Malaga.
SEVILLE: FALL 2024
Situated along the Guadalquivir River, Sevilla is the capital and largest city of Andalusia. Originally settled as a Roman city, Sevilla has been a significant Islamic and Christian center for more than 1000 years and became one of Europe’s largest cities in the 16th century when it was the gateway to the Spanish Empire’s trans-Atlantic trade. (Sevilla also hosted the first tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition in 1478.) Historically the city is richer in surprising ways as its urban tissue has been preserved and integrated into contemporary life, All the Moorish, Jewish, and Christian neighborhoods have been woven into an all-inclusive tapestry.
Students explore the implications of a complex program, site, and city; and study the persisting urban questions that underpin any practice in such a charged context. The project entails the redevelopment of the “La Trinidad” glass factory site in the center of Seville, just outside the ancient city walls. In this dense urban setting of Sevilla’s old town and near a restored section of the historic defensive walls, originally of Almoravid origin. The studio is posed as a counterproposal to the twin missteps of designing a city without regard to the intimate experience of place, and the design of articulated artifacts without a direct relationship to their larger sense of place in the world.
In contrast, this studio proposes the radical position that urban design is conceived in concert with the buildings it implies and that buildings are designed in concert with a deep-seated concern for the larger places in which they are situated. the studio will oscillate between the micro and the macro, with the expectation that these foci are interdependent and crucial to the design of each aspect of the project. For architecture students, the studio presents the opportunity for the careful crafting of buildings integrated hand in hand with larger notions of their place in the world. For urban designers, the studio presents an opportunity to design a district with particular attention given to the spatial and material consequences for the public realm.