1 (individual papers) _ sf (various sites) 2 months each (11.2009-12.2009, )
TRACES OF URBAN DESIGN
translations from Garnier to Sert, through Le Corbusier’s take on the CIAM IV Athens charter
COURSE Arch 3021a, Architectural Theory I (1750-1968)
PROFESSOR Emmanuel Petit
As shown through many examples in the first half of the twentieth century, the town plan can clearly express the social and architectural ideas of its creator. It was pivotally used by a series of architects portraying and shaping the ideas of the evolving Rationalist movement. The progression that Le Corbusier describes in 1946 puts Tony Garnier’s Cité Industrielle as the primary source, August Perret second, the magazine l’Esprit Nouveau (showing his Ville Contemporaine/Contemporary City for three million inhabitants) in third, and the Athens Charter (based on his own thesis of the Ville Radieuse/Radiant City) fourth. I would like to upend this tree and investigate it from the roots. I look to shake out the dirt that occludes the concepts that Garnier set forth, first exposing how those were transformed by Le Corbusier and CIAM through the Athens Charter and secondly how they were retranslated by Sert in the blossoming of Urban Design as a profession. My thesis is to investigate a combination of these influences to show how Garnier’s project fed into the ideas of Urban Design, some filtered through CIAM and exposed, others dropped and later updated. [pdf]
POSTMODERN URBANISM: FROM COLLAGE CITY TO MULTI-NATIONAL CITY
Development and Divergence of Urban Design
COURSE Arch 703b, Contemporary Architectural Theory, (1960-Present)
PROFESSOR Ariane Lourie Harrison / Marta Caldeira
Forefront in the education of urbanism lay the stunning utopian vistas of modernism. By their shock value they awe, defining a new era of how the human interacts with the city. Drawing directly from ideals shaped in architecture, the utopia is one of abstraction, efficiency, and scale. The fallout from these visions is plural and still evolving, and has led to the multiple physical and theoretical responses of postmodern urbanism. There are particular continuities and disjunctions which have shaped the postmodern response from the defining early texts of Lynch, Jacobs, Venturi, and Rowe/Koetter, to the resurgence of urban interest in recent years through Koolhaas and Martin/Baxi. Assuming the premise of postmodernism as an extension of modernism, I look to pull apart these lines of thought to see what of the modern movement withstands, and what trajectories are changing the shape of postmodern urbanism and the new discipline of Urban Design. Focusing on an early postmodern text, Collage City (1977) by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, and a contemporary text, Multi-National City (2007) by Reinhold Martin and Kadambari Baxi, I will analyze these shifts particularly through their representation, inclusions/exclusions, and larger consequences. [pdf]
1 (individual papers)
