The studio-based course will give participants an insight into design strategies and processes for urban transformation. The main focus of the course is to introduce and critically discuss urban textures, and how aspects of architectural design, or concepts of architectural thinking, act at the scale and in the context of urban planning and design. A series of workshops, spanning the majority of the studio, will each focus on a chosen aspect, going in-depth into the properties and conditions of that aspect and emerging in a contextualized analysis of and proposal for change in a given area.
The chosen area for the studio work will thus be studied as three different textures - such as textures of mass and void, of landscapes and flows, or of programmed and emergent use. This study will be followed by a final project that draws from what is learnt in the workshops to produce a proposal for the area's development into a sustainable urban setting, reaching into a future where this has changed from an aim to a necessity and reality.
The studio is based on intense work in workshops and on the project; the majority of work will be performed in groups, though some work will be individual. Rapid parallel production, reflection, and alteration of analyses and of the proposal lie at the heart of the studio, supported by continuous supervision and several presentations. Focus and clarity will be trained both through discussion and through forms of presentation. Most presentations will follow a format where the work should be possible to understand by external reviewers without additional clarification.
The studio works with a wide range of tools and forms of analysis, changing in relation to the texture being studied, and students can expect to not only work with digital tools but also physical models and other forms of representation so as to develop an understanding of and critical relation to the relations between question, media, representational form, and proposal.