Monday 5 December 2011

Week 11 Films


“Guest Speakers at IE: Thom Mayne, Architecture and Education”

Theme was innovation in architecture education in Madrid.
Current challenged in architectural education.
What are the most significant changes? The position of the architect is diminished the power of the client has increased. The potential of design activities have radically increased due to digital practice. What is the next big challenge facing education? Diminishing role of architects as designers is problematic. Fewer and fewer architects are asked to answer ecological problems and complex problems and that has to change. The students are now transferable into many different fields. Rethink the political. Strength of students is now broad. Students are inquisitive, optimistic, sense of contemporary. Changes taking place in our society today is problem formation, we need to become much more active.

“Architecture Deans talk about the future of Education”

Resolve the gap between education and professional world. Make architecture location a bigger identity. We need to reach a bigger audience, all disciplines. The video talked about a meeting at a university with the theme being Globalization has effected architectural education as a discipline and relation on the profession. The 2011 summit the theme was architecture education and network community of the deans. Different circumstances have different educational methods. Change the matter of the way societies look at each other. The three-day summit had different opinions on innovation. There are new platforms of education and the architecture field is ever changing, with new themes.

“Education in Architecture: Global Difference.”

This video is a set of issues and ideas and observations he has made through out the world. Architecture and design suffers from extreme upper class individualism, and there is too much information and too little knowledge. It creates an inverse relationship.  Design studio has become a competition and we subject them to the worst kind of reviews and they are worked so hard often to tears and that is considered education. We need to rethink the process of building and ethical modes of practice. Students need to work as cooperative working. He thinks studio is done so wrong and needs to change. He discusses his study in Africa. He thinks that the preconditions should be created with the school. He pictured South African architecture education and described it as all over the place. In South African there could be potential in the next 15-20 years

“Preston Scott Cohen: Challenges of Architectural Education”

Architecture is a field of expertise, while leaving opens the field for experimentation. The schools have motivated the field and experiments would never be done in the professional world. The school needs to be in a reality and spring forward for future development. There is open tension between providing access deep knowledge of techniques of specificity and precision of architecture for ongoing advancement of the field and leaving open realms of aimless architecture education. Design should not be goal orientated. Doing work and studying things, and stuff that is useless will eventually become a tremendous effect as an official architect. 

Tuesday 29 November 2011

(Class Notes) History as a Stepping Stone for Present and Future

Movement is an element we design around
- 1950's street design

Megastructure
Naked City: conception of unknown parks and how the city connected together, essentially making a new city.  It is a new and different understanding in a disjuncted way.

  • Connection of urban blocks
  • Layered construction
  • Possibility of air, underground, expanding vertically, horizontally
Proposed large projects took place in the 1960's and 1970's
What are they not evident today?
  • Possibility of communist countries who see the needs for larger agenda.  Democractic society doesn't seem to need the same values
  • Funding is not available
  • Economic drops (Recession) 
  • Political regimes depict what exist
New Aesthetic Framework
  • Development of electrical lines - In 1910 they were exposed.  As underground sewers and electrical lines were developed, they structural elements were actually built into the structure. 
Otherness in Architecture
  • Sense of connection between humans and machines: Union station in Winnipeg, was once the largest building in 1910, it connected society.  
  • Religious Structures: Churches
  • Museums
  • Heating/Cooling plant: aids the machine (support)
  • Warehouses
All these types of "others" aid each other in the fabric of the city: machining, living, working. 

As money flow became available in the 1950's, customized housing became popular.  

Mutant Acts (out of the box)
Who are we designing for?  How can we design for and with machines, nature and humans.  

Dreamscape (desire)
  • What is our ideal? Possibly desired cash flow, infrastructure development, technology
  • We have to project our version of what is ideal in order to achieve it.  What is our plan?  
There are confessions and discussions in what to teach, so a collective standard of direction should be an educational goal.  We must pay attention to opportunities, such as mutant spaces (who was or maintains these?)

Monday 28 November 2011

Anxious Landscapes: From the Ruin to Rust

The entrance into of the metropolitan infrastructure  has deteriorated from what was intentionally created for the landscape.  Many metropolitan areas have turned into ruins, which inhabit filthy land which are disturbing to the eye and discomforting for those who experience them.  

Nature has obliterated itself in these metropolitan areas. 
Natural nature no longer lives here, but instead has morphed into asphalt, warehouses and rusty cars. 

Technological landscape: objects within park, bridges.  - in contact with natural setting  The relation between man made constructions and nature is inverted.  In urban infrastructural landscapes,  the city stops being in the landscape and is now the landscape itself.  

Impressionists: city became landscape more independently from the framework of nature.    The city absorbed the countryside.  Infrastructures and equipment have obtained bigger importance then the era when sewage systems were a novelty.  

In cities, large infrastructures have not disappeared, but technology has penetrated everywhere beneath the cement and piers of buildings.  You cannot see the technology but it is still everywhere.  The presence is almost haunting in the form of billboards, video screens etc.  The ATM and road system in the neighbourhood both contain the same amount of connections in the electronic circuits, even though both items are on completely different scales.

The question seems to be: how does this landscape form itself when the intention was to create a functional urban scape.  The landscape is the visual perception, and the person who experiences it passes judgement as it appears, not by what is within.

As the timeline progresses, terms are explained which capture the feeling within the landscape: Imprisonment through the these landscapes and how sustainable development can hinge the vulnerability of these environments.

Technical objects begin to seem draining because the become so commonly used.  After awhile the contemporary technology morphs into connections of technological framework which make up the city. There is no escape of technology, it almost seems like a humans every move is marked within the space

Can over equipped city that surrounds us be considered landscape, even with aesthetic connotations attached to term? The aesthetic of a landscape resides in the visual perception and in the culture. 

Class Notes


ECOLOGICAL Urbanism           
SUSTAINABLE Urbanism
LANDSCAPE Urbanism
INFRASTRUCTURAL Urbanism
EVERYDAY Urbanism (messy urbanism)

·       Equity /democracy/ diversity
·       Big firms and mega projects
·       Actual work vs perceived size
·       Lack of core belief
·       Practice follows the dynamism of realities
·       Equity – policy
o   What equity is an important issue in urban realm?
§  Public/ government
§  Community accessibility
§  Mix use X mix class
§  Possibility of mixing “CLASS” (religious)
·       Economic issues – possible rising of housing prices
o   Steven Hol – California
·       Decoupling – design and form
·       Economic planning
·       Sensibility, awareness, engage (dialogue)

Louis Kahn
(Philadelphia Traffic Study) 1952)

Traces of 15 Projects

Street/Movement (Team X)
o   Learning from investigating “streets”

1963: Archigram – Living City Exhibition
1969: Superstudio – A journey from A to B
1957: Asger Jorn + Guy Debord – The Naked City
1958: Smithsons – Berlin Haupstadt Project
            Street in Air
1959: Constant – New Babylon
1956: Yona Friedman – L’Architecture Mobile
1969 & 1970: Instant City
1971: Twelve Ideal Cities – Superstudio

Monday 21 November 2011

Territories of Urbanism (Challenges)

Urban design create new relationship through the engagement of landscape and urbanism
Urban design might just lodge landscape architecture as a conceivable home
Challenges of urban design to move forward:
  • Mobility 
  • Contemporary economy 
  • Ecology
Richard Marshall's arguments:

  • Embedded in a discourse : landscape architecture was a central to the project 
  • Diminishing of landscape role: mobilization/operability of the program and the descendant of the architecture defining urban design
The speaker thinks focusing on a single profession metaphor in urban design coincide precisely with the formation of an academic program is not coincidental. The challenges in urban design might be due to the struggle between the institutionalization of the discourse of urban design and the need we address challenges which exceed or transcend boundaries. 
Urban environment transcend disciplinary and professional boundary and thus he suggests that we need to look back in history to "rewrite our present context". 


Second person

There are three things need to be important normative principles:

1.    Equity

2.    Democracy

3.    Diversity

She said as there are a lot of issue areas of city planning and designs these three things may come out in different ways (equity, diversity and democracy). Also when the three value come out in different way it should receive priority.



Third person

He talked about challenge of urban planning



Fourth person

She talked about urban identity which has thickness, density, section use efficacy.



Fifth person

She showed the example of this building in Millennium is good example of practice of aim to produce.

She also said “be generous of design”.

Dongdaemun Market - Seoul Korea


Dongdaemoon market-seoul Korea is a strategic marketing complex designed to sell commercial/personal and random goods during the late hours of the night.  Local merchandise stores typically close the doors to their establishment at the regular closing hours of 9pm.  This is the time the Market-Seoul opens.  The regular business' come here to shop for goods which they will resell the next day.  The commercial market has become a tourism target, so it also attracts people of all kinds.  The market has slowly rebuilt over the years has been renovated into a modern atmosphere with a traditional feel.    
This seems odd to Canadian culture, and almost wrong.  However, the Korean economy circulates in a responsive and logical order, so all sellers are happy.  

Saturday 19 November 2011

Class Notes


 Temporary Contracts
-Postindustrial landscape
-Reliance on information processing
-Service industry focus
-Globally integrated market
-Mobile capital/ credit
-Speed/ mobility/ malleability
-Planned obsolescence/ disposable assets/ flexible accumulations
-Consuming relationships
-Objects in culture/ objects of consumption and public realms vs private realms
-Temporary value
-Client shareholder gratification/ intergenerational responsibility
-Commercial/ critical –equally consumable (architizer)… aspire to be ‘of the moment’

-Sophisticated market research; new technology; cultural critics

What responsibility does corporate North American have to the general public in this regard? Should large companies be held more accountable or are we as consumers simply to be the only ones held accountable for our actions.
-Temporary contracts: Minimal commitment culture attitude.

What if Walmart was no longer allowed to systematically take advantage of and destroy the economic base of small communities?
-This would be a counter-cultural movement

Nomadic Existence and lifestyle

Is a contemporary nomadic existence necessarily a negative way of life?
-No it creates a lot of jobs

Is it possible to live the lifestyle of a way of life?
What are the sustaining values of today?
Is it possible to live the lifestyle of a nomad as a collective, moving an entire city to find fresh resources?

An example is Dongdaemoon market-seoul Korea [Tower of Mega shod]
-They created a collective new paradime organizationally co-operable

Practice
-Networking/ intuitive/ situated/ uncharted
-Customization/ standardization
-Public relations
-Professional territories
-Engineering/ marketing/ construction/ management/ developer
_how can we or should we even do it?
           
We looked at three firms:

MY MASS STUFF

MY – Mystudio
Mass – Massstudios
STUFF – Studies on Transformative Urban Forms And Fields

Examples:

-Steel Pattern Partition prototype
-My studio-loop chair
-One study propagates the further study
-My studio hover
-Massstudio – art trad
-Goganhyme at new york
-Massstudies – torque house