SIDE WALKS FALL 2022 - ADVANCED i GRADUATE STUDIO - INSTRUCTOR: BRIAN BELL

STUDIO OVERVIEW

Buildings participate in the formation of our shared public experience and rightly consume the majority of our focus in architecture schools. However, as the painter must know how to build a canvas, this studio focuses on designing a building together with the essential elements of the city that frame it - the sidewalks, streets and spaces that knit a building into a memorable urban place. The idea and presence of the ‘sidewalk’ was the spring point for investigations into urban architectures.

Site

The site for your project is located a 10-minute walk from the School of Architecture - just west of Marietta Street, in a parking lot where a bridge used to carry a road that linked Washington, DC to San Diego, California. The site is bounded by railroads, apartments, offices and an art museum, and is soon to be a gateway between the Westside BeltLine trail and Georgia Tech’s pedestrian network – both sidewalks in their own way.

Program

Each student will design a generic mixed-use office building, developing an architecture that exploits the role of sidewalks to create an intense, diverse urban ‘culture’ in and around your building. Ground level ‘mixed uses’ will be incorporated and developed in relationship with designed sidewalk conditions.

Research

Sidewalks - conceptual and physical devices, “abstractions” as Jane Jacobs calls them, that accommodate urban life and connect here and there

Passages - research into the relationships between corridors and rooms, sidewalks and plazas

Thresholds - research into the psychological affects of thresholds, and sidewalks as a type of threshold both for and between events

Non-Referential Architecture - we will study Valerio Olgiati’s idea of the ‘experience of space’

Bibliography

Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs, 1961

Figures, Doors & Passages, Robin Evans, 1978

Close encounters with buildings, Gehl, Kaefer and Reigstad, 2006

Why Walking through a Doorway Makes You Forget, Brenner & Zacks, 2011

Non-Referential Architecture, Valerio Olgiati and Markus Breitschmid, 2018

FEATURED PROJECTS

THE RIPPLE OF THE CITY

DESIGN BY CHIEN-HAO (HOWARD), LAN

THE URBAN MEMBRANE

DESIGN BY KAREN TRAN

BREADTH OF URBAN CHOICES

DESIGN BY LYNN EL KHOURY