Urban Design Studio I is an advanced studio for the post-professional Urban Design program at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. Along with other required urban design courses, this studio initiates the core studio sequence for first-year Master of Urban Design students. It aims to introduce foundational concepts, critical strategies, and representational skills in urbanism and design thinking. It also aims to provide disciplinary and practical knowledge in analyzing and speculating on complex urban systems through design and research. More broadly, the studio bridges the disciplinary training of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning to critically interrogate urban, social, and environmental questions through spatial and formal strategies.
Since 2023 fall, the investigative focus of Urban Design Studio I has been the regional context of the “Texas Triangle”, encompassing a series of urban research and design propositions on three major urban centers—Austin-San Antonio, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Houston—along with other metropolitan areas in between. The 2024 fall studio leverages our location in Austin as an urban laboratory, focusing on how an expanded notion of urban infrastructure and landscape can encompass a much more pivotal role in forming new models of collective space today. More specifically, by re-envisioning the proposed Interstate 35 – University of Texas highway deck cap, the studio is experimenting with typological innovations within Austin’s urban block formation, to accommodate a greater diversity of density, modes of transit, public spaces, and urban lifestyles. Simultaneously, the studio investigates the morphological formations of Austin by excavating the reciprocal relations between the development of its urban corridors and the repercussions on socio-economic conditions.
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