STUDIO OVERVIEW
This undergraduate design studio introduces fundamental principles of urbanism and focuses upon the city as a site for architecture. Mixed-use programs with an emphasis upon multi-family housing are embedded in and responsive to distinct urban conditions propel the shaping of public and private domains. Social, Cultural, and Ecological considerations are foregrounded through urban analysis and in the development of typological and tectonic strategies of form and use.
The studio site encompasses the Edgewood-Candler Park MARTA Station north of Dekalb Avenue and its extended urban ecology. The study area is the subject of ongoing Transit Oriented Development speculation and is riven both physically and politically by infrastructural, density, and other quality-of-life concerns.
The studio unfolds in a series of discrete phases of research and design, each building upon and transforming the others. With a focus on analytically mapping systems and flows, specific areas of research and consideration include:
• the history of the site and its transformations – with an emphasis on urban repair.
• issues of sustainable urban development, including responsible water management, ecology of place, and human scaled living.
• the socio-spatial basis of urban housing typologies, their transformation and hybridization, through comparison of historical and contemporary examples.
Emphasis is placed on two sets of reflexive relationships: between housing typology and urban block, each informing and being informed by the other; and the reciprocity between representation and construction as a motive force propelling design. The studio treats research and design as co-extensive activities rather than as disjointed means and ends. Students critically frame the issues through guided readings, historical research, contextual and diagrammatic mapping, digital and physical modeling, and speculative design investigations in multi-media as modes of creative research.
Key Topics and Concepts introduced as part of the design process include:
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals; Living Building Challenge; Transit-Oriented Development; Intentional Communities and Political Economies (public + private); Housing Typologies; Missing Middle Housing; the Pompeiian courtyard house; the American bungalow.