MSAUD

MS.AUD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, PLANNING, AND PRESERVATION

Master of Science in Urban Design

1.0 Program Overview Richard Plunz, Director

The Urban Design Program is focused on the state of the city in the 21st century, in an age of rapid urbanization and cities of growth and contraction that face the transition to new forms and meanings.

The program weaves a dialogue between New York City, which is its primary focus, and other world capitals and analogous contemporary conditions; moving between recent theoretical debate on future urbanism, and applied projects that directly engage the realities of the transformations of the postindustrial city. The program attempts to engage both the daily reality of our urban condition and the theoretical abstraction of current academic debate; not one to the exclusion of the other. Urban Design is pursued as a critical reassessment of conventional approaches relative to questions of site, program, infrastructure, and form-mass, as they have been defined by Urban Design practice during the past century. The Urban Design curriculum engages the role of architecture in the formation of a discourse on urbanism at this moment of post-industrial development and indeed, of post-urban sensibility relative to traditional Euro-American settlement norms.

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The Urban Design curriculum exploits the pedagogic potential of the studio as a form of design-based critical inquiry. Studio projects focus on topics related to contemporary Urban Design practice. All three studios emphasize a multiscalar approach to the urban site (local, neighborhood, metropolitan, regional and global scales), and view Urban Design as an inter-disciplinary practice that negotiates between diverse actors in the urban dynamic.

By proposing an expanded architecturally-based teaching model for Urban Design, the program advocates working from the “ground up,” rather than adopting a “top down” master-planning approach. It takes advantage of architecture’s traditional concerns for site specificity, spatial experience, construction logics, economics of organization, morphology and physical form, while also engaging realms of knowledge associated with disciplines such as urban ecology, urban geography, and landscape design. In this sense, the program is considered experimental, exploratory, and unorthodox relative to the established canons of the traditional architectural design studio.

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The sequencing of the studios is intended to build the linguistic substructure that is essential to Urban Design thought and practice. This emphasis evolves from how representation of the urban site determines the quality of site knowledge (Representation); to how discourse on the city determines interpretations of its past and projections of its futures (Discourse); to the invention of the strategic languages of public engagement involving operational mechanisms for urban transformation at both the formal and programmatic levels (Public Synthesis). The sequence of seminars reinforce this construct. While each studio presents students with differing urban conditions and programming opportunities, all three semesters together reinforce the Program’s commitment to help individual designers develop rigorous Urban Design tools and methods; to acquire a working language to communicate Urban Design ideas; and to enhance the critical skills needed to test and refine Urban Design strategies.

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The summer studio engages New York City as a laboratory, exploring the full range of contemporary neighborhood conditions (inner city, periphery, and outer periphery). The fall studio engages a critical analysis of urbanism as a discursive field, as construed differently by diverse disciplines. It considers how Urban Design in the New York City region must confront two interrelated tendencies. Hyper-urbanism, manifested in the continued concentration of people and capital in Manhattan, exists concurrently with reurbanization along the regional infrastructure that is finding new meanings given today’s postsuburban tendencies involving our changing urban ecological footprint. The spring studio moves the discursive field from the New York context to other world contexts, while the exploration of Urban Design language reaches its most public phase.

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2.0 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PROGRAM The Urban Design Program at Columbia originated in 1935, when the Carnegie Corporation funded a postgraduate curriculum to “enlarge the range of studies offered to architects” within the fields of urbanism and housing.

These goals remain central to the program today. The original experiment was dominated by the personages of Henry Wright, Werner Hegemann, and Carol Aronovici. Their focus was on the social and physical form of the emerging twentieth-century metropolis, with considerable influence from the English experience of the previous several decades.

Columbia’s Urban Planning Program also evolved from these beginnings, with some ambiguity between urban “design” and “planning.” By the 1960’s, 5

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however, both disciplines had acquired distinct identities. A separate Master of Science for Urban Design was initiated in the 1964-1965 school year with Percival Goodman as a prime pedagogic force. During this time, the program was influenced by the cultural critique of the Team Ten group in Europe within the framework of the growing problems associated with urban “renewal” and urban dispersal in the United States. Between 1972 and 1974, the program was restructured under the directorship of Romaldo Giurgola, and then again in 1974 under Alexander Cooper, a member of the New York City Planning Commission. With the involvement of Stanton Eckstut, the program was heavily refocused on Urban Design practice, as it had evolved in New York City during the Lindsay administration. This approach held until the early 1990’s when the evolution to present curriculum began. The MS.AUD program now engages the urban consequences of the same period that witnessed its formation.

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3.0 Required Studio and Seminar Sequence The core of the Urban Design curriculum is a three-semester sequence of related studios and seminars.

The summer and fall studios are foundational, addressing constructive aspects of the Urban Design process. The spring studio is a culmination and synthesis of the previous two, drawing on re-interpretations of previous learning while further exploring the question of operational mechanisms for urban transformation at both the formal and programmatic levels. This final studio moves from the New York region to other global urban contexts. All studios assert that the grounding conditions of an Urban Design project — site and program — are complex concepts, which must be actively and critically constructed rather than simply accepted as “givens” beyond the designers’ control. The summer semester seminar provides an overview of the recent literature on the question of urbanism. The fall semester seminars investigate the evolution of urban fabric with comparative study of New York and other world cities. The spring semester seminars explore recent theoretical debate, focused on the problematic of public space in the 21st century city.

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4.0 Urban Design Faculty Plunz, Richard Professor

Moore, Justin Adjunct Assistant Professor

Baratloo, Mojdeh Adjunct Associate Professor

Orff, Katherine Assistant Professor

Chasin, Noah Adjunct Assistant Professor

Ratinam, Mathanraj Adjunct Assistant Professor

Conard, Michael Adjunct Associate Professor

Raven, Jeffrey Adjunct Assistant Professor

Davison, Bruce Adjunct Assistant Professor

Rose, Evan Adjunct Assistant Professor

Duncan, Skye Adjunct Assistant Professor

Shane, David Adjunct Professor

Duong, Phu Adjunct Associate Professor

Stipisic, Morana Adjunct Assistant Professor

Jackson, Earl G. Adjunct Assistant Professor

Soong, Angela Adjunct Assistant Professor

Jones, Casey Adjunct Associate Professor

Theocharopoulou, Ioanna Adjunct Assistant Professor

Keith, Vanessa Visiting Associate Professor

Barry, Elizabeth Associate

Kempf, Petra Adjunct Assistant Professor

Pauly, Matthew Associate

Kenworthey, William Adjunct Assistant Professor

Verbakel, Ward Adjunct Assistant Professor

Kroner, Christopher Adjunct Assistant Professor Kuhl, Kaja Adjunct Assistant Professor Marpillero, Sandro Adjunct Associate Professor Martin, Tricia Adjunct Assistant Professor Mehta, Geeta Adjunct Associate Professor COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY GSAPP

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5.0 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS A6849 Urban Design Studio I: Kaja K端hl, Coordinator; Skye Duncan, Earl Jackson, Evan Rose, Tricia Martin.

Three ambitions guide the first Urban Design Studio: to nurture a design process specific to existing urban environments; to critically consider site and program; and to interrogate the role of Urban Design in service to the public as a client. The studio provides a framework for students to expand their design thinking using New York City as a laboratory. Students are introduced to a post-industrial, built-out American city through its past, current and future layers of neighborhoods, public spaces and infrastructure. Designing for growth and change in the context of the built-out metropolis requires an array of emergent Urban Design tools for researching, mapping, investigating and hypothesizing the continuous transformation of the city. Over the course of the semester we explore methods of defining and representing urban sites and their multi-scalar, multivalent systemic linkages within the city and the region.

The studio treats site and program as value-laden constructs that embody 9

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powerful intentionality with respect to the process and products of Urban Design. For Urban Design, “site” is not a given. Urban Designers must identify and investigate complex, layered contexts, operating at multiple scales, within which urban places are embedded. Similarly, the construction of “program” is essential to the Urban Designer’s purview; opportunities exist to extend and expand the field for human action and interaction. In this first Urban Design Studio, these explorations are framed by (re)search into the (re)definition of the concept of “infrastructure,” encouraging students to critically investigate and assess the many layers of public systems relevant for constructing transformative urban environments. Understanding Urban Design’s primary concerns as serving a public clientele, students are asked to develop speculative hypotheses for new infrastructures that address the multiple needs of a variety of stakeholders at different scales, embedding their hypothesis in a site-specific design for a particular neighborhood, while impacting the larger scale of the city.

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A6850 Urban Design Studio II: Mojdeh Baratloo, Coordinator; Sandro Marpillero, Justin G. Moore, Angela Chen-Mai Soong, Frank Ruchala Jr., with Ward Verbakel; Trent Lethco, Nadereh Nouhi, Daniel Wiley.

The second Urban Design Studio accepts the premise that the practice of Urban Design is interdisciplinary; and the result of a kinetic relationship between architecture, public policy, and the economy; operating at scales that often exceed the limits of a specific site, a city, or a region. The studio collectively examines the influence exerted by these factors, and the immense impact they have in the making of an urban environment – and by extension its public and private spaces and the perceived quality-of-life of urban situations. The studio’s topical emphasis considers the complex dynamic between “Energy, Economy, and Ecology” of New York State and its cities. Students focus on semester-long projects, addressing the potential of both the cities and the State as a whole to successfully maintain viable communities with sustainable resources. The studio’s fundamental pedagogy advocates for simultaneous, collaborative research and development of design concepts as generative ingredients of new and alternative ways through which viable, vital urban environments are understood and conceived.

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A fundamental aim is to challenge the default mode of approaching architecture, landscape and infrastructure as isolated disciplines, and to examine the opportunities for overlap such that all three are evolved in concert with one another and to the best possible effect. The studio also recognizes the unique relationship of New York State to the waterways and other infrastructure that historically has supported its vitality and defined its character. Therefore the natural and manufactured armatures defined by the New York Harbor, the Hudson River, the Erie Canal and ultimately the State’s relationship with the Great Lakes Region, are the expanded site of the studio’s discourse. Through carefully developed and substantiated design proposals, the studio examines and challenges the ways in which the armature cities and the State’s various infrastructures, socio-cultural diversities and their political context can come together intelligently, responsibly and experientially.

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MS.AUD Degree Requirements

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A6851 Urban Design Studio III: Richard Plunz, Coordinator; Michael Conard, Petra Kempf, Geeta Mehta, Kate Orff and Visitors.

The emphasis of the final Urban Design Studio represents a synthesis of the previous semesters, from consideration of the overall organization and structure of an urban conurbation, to the detailed design resolution of particular fragments within this larger hierarchy. This latter component is related more to questions of fabric than monument, and to the comprehensive resolution of programmatic, spatial, and typological issues. The emphasis is more on neighborhood and daily life than on the unique or the ceremonial. The studio addresses these concerns within urban environments that are in transition with particular emphasis on the resulting spatial reconfigurations relative to new economic parameters.

This final studio moves the discursive field from the New York context to other world cities. Political engagement of Urban Design exploration is intensified, 15

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such that the reconditioning of the urban site must be critically responsive to specified goals of the sponsoring urban agency or “client.� Public projection of the work is also an integral part of the design conception. Proposals must be complete in all aspects, including a well-articulated theoretical and operational premise and a building-scale design fragment that reflects and objectifies the overall strategy. Additionally, the work must be capable of engaging public discourse on several levels, including the body politic of the particular city involved. Frequently, the studio culminates in a return trip, the mounting of an exhibition, or preparation of a publication. Studio locations have included Istanbul, Brussels, Detroit, Caracas, London, Naples, Mostar, Mexico City, Prague, Belgrade, Tuscany, Bangkok, Brisbane, Bucharest, Rome, Seoul, Quito, Guayaquil, Vienna, Mumbai and Kingston, Jamaica.

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A4005 Joint UD/Master of Architecture Studio: Richard Plunz and staff.

This studio option is offered in the fall semester to encourage exchange between the Urban Design and Architecture curricula, and is open only to M.Arch and MSAAD students. This studio works in tandem with the Urban Design studios to investigate catalysts in the development of urban infrastructure, including the possibilities inherent to cultural transformation. Urban Design and architecture students collaborate to explore issues inclusive of the socio-economic factors in urban development, including the relation between production and consumption of culture; urban cultural displacements and social class; the design of public space as civic activity; and the relation between urban ecology and the concept of landscape urbanism.

The activity of design at the urban scale is interdisciplinary by nature. It must operate between the physicality and design orientation of architecture and the abstractions of economic and social policy. As a result, this studio incorporates the representation and communication techniques needed to transliterate between the diverse array of forces which tend to generate urbanity. The challenge of this studio is to work between the limits of the disciplines of architecture, urban planning, and urban engineering, by exploring a new field in which to create urban situations in space and time, with an emphasis on public movement and networks.

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A6836 Urban Design Seminar I: Urban Theory & Design in the PostIndustrial Age:
Noah Chasin, Sara Stevens.

This seminar is an introduction to the theoretical, critical, and formal vocabularies of postwar urbanism throughout the United States, Europe, and beyond.

The class is arranged thematically and, in a larger context, chronologically.

The rise of new urbanisms as a result of rapidly proliferating technological and industrial advances is explored as a backdrop to various Urban Design strategies that have been subsequently deployed: from suburban sprawl to the Team 10 critique of interwar functionalism; from megastructures to semiotic models; from New Urbanism to X-Urbanism. Such paradigms are measured with development of critiques within a comparative framework; in an effort to gain an understanding of the processes that provide the structures and infrastructures for built environments.

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A6824 Reading New York Urbanism: Phu T. Duong, Digital Coordinator; Elizabeth Barry, Michael Szivos.

This seminar focuses on three critical questions embedded in the title: what is reading? what is New York? what is urbanism? By developing methods of urban recording — the mastering of mapping, dynamic and interactive software, and an understanding of cinematic techniques, we rephrase and revisit these questions throughout the semester. The act of reading involves processing of information, and in our case, a recording of urban pattern. In a rapidly changing and never constant city, students are challenged to explore new tools of investigation that are able to respond to the multi-dimensional structure of its urban fabric and the activities happening within it. Given our physical location within New York City, students are asked to explore the city extensively. We treat the city as a reality in flux, taking part in multiple temporalities such as seasonal cycles of change. This definition of urbanism is not a constant one, and exists at many levels and across many disciplines. It cannot be described from a purely objective point of view. Therefore, we employ a web-based logbook and software packages such as Flash and AfterEffects, to develop cinematic investigative techniques in exploring a multifaceted reading of urban sites.

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A4528 Digital Modeling for Urban Design:
Phu T. Duong, Digital Coordinator; Christopher Kroner.

This introductory class is for architects with or without a background in digital techniques for Urban Design representation. In addition to introducing computer modeling, data mapping and interface design, the course emphasizes the critical use of these technologies for Urban Design practice. Fundamental skills are developed for learning Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and 3-D modeling. The course emphasizes the interrelation and integration of direct observation of urban sites that encourage non-traditional methods for spatial representation. The goal is to construct urban analyses and designoriented communication techniques as experiments that are tuned to the construction of urban arguments. Weekly lectures, tutorials and an exercise sequence culminate in a final digital presentation.

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A6837 Urban Design Seminar II A: Fabrics and Typologies: New York/ Global: Richard Plunz.

This course explores the meaning of building typology and fabric in the evolution of cities worldwide. It questions the canons of architectural and urban historiography that tend to overemphasize isolated urban monuments and heroic designers. Part I of the seminar comprises lectures by the instructor on the history of New York as evolution of its anonymous urban fabric. The focus is on the culture of housing, with the intent to grasp the political and tectonic devices that lead to specific fabrics in specific urban contexts. The city becomes a crucible to be understood both forwards and backwards in time, from extant present-day realities to underlying formational causes and vice versa. Part II of the seminar applies this exercise in urban forensics to the study of other global cities, translated from New York by the students who apply their analytic techniques and values to a place embedded in their own local knowledge. This exercise culminates in a forum that, among other things, compares designs for hypothetical architectural transformation of the casestudy fabrics. Using this as a basis for critical analysis, we strategically explore design responses to urban “non-design� anonymity within the discipline of Urban Design.

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A6832 Urban Design Seminar II B: Urban Prefigurations: New York/ Global: Michael Conard.

The accelerated rate of unprecedented urban change fueled by the proliferation of information technologies and service industries challenges traditional and theoretical Urban Design paradigms, pedagogies and practices. Conventional practice and normative conceptions of fabric are challenged in the context of variant conditions such as sprawl, generic landscapes, informal settlements, preservation districts, marginalized centers, disused industrial zones and the environmental questions of climate change, obesity and peak oil. Metaphors for chaos, complexity, bio-urbanism, junk space, fluidity, transparency and dynamism have flourished. Yet the ability of these constructs to engage the drivers of urban form and urban policy change remain unclear and suspect. The seminar introduces students to the logic of western market driven development; to the means and methods in which design in the contemporary city is conceived, created and regulated; and to historical and contemporary land-use controls. Part I of the seminar includes weekly lectures by the instructor and/or invited guests and review of required readings.

Discussions focus initially on New York City and its development through land use controls and market forces; then expands to explore contemporary evolutions of other global cities. Part II of the seminar is organized around student presentations of global case studies that analyze formal urban conditions and develop schematic strategic design responses.

A6829 Urban Design Seminar II C: Design Manifestos: New York/ Global. Evan Rose.

The question of what is “Urban Design” in our global age begins with an inherent paradox of the premise — can anything as complex as a 21st century city be designed? This is neither a new question nor an inhibitor of action. Rather it is a relevant frame for understanding the role that “manifestos,” idealized philosophies of city design, have had on the designing and building of cities, and, looking forward, for positioning ways of conceptualizing a contemporary urban future. In this course we look at a series of proclaimed Urban Design theories, each of which has had great influence on the profession and on cities across the globe. New York City is used as a lens for understanding how cities are formed based on idealistic constructs such as the City Beautiful, Modernism, Hyper-Urbanism, and Eco-Urbanism. Based on this understanding, students select global cities that present challenges such as explosive growth, sustainability, and infrastructure, and through which they can develop and apply their own manifestos; or anti-manifestos that question whether such metatheories are even viable as frameworks for guiding design into an increasingly urbanized and complex future.

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A6838 Urban Design Seminar III A:
Infrastructure, Resilience, and Public Space: Jeffrey Raven, Morana Stipisic.

This seminar explores the development of integrated, multi-disciplinary urban design paradigms for creating resilient communities that can adapt and thrive in the changing global conditions, meet carbon-reduction goals, and sustain urban populations in more compact settings by focusing on infrastructure and public space amenities that are key to healthy urban growth.

Participants will explore urban design approaches, methods and tools to strengthen community resilience to climate change through a systemic, interconnected public realm and green infrastructure to achieve reduced energy loads, cleaner air and enhanced civic life. The seminar will look into prototype case study frameworks and methodologies in both local and international contexts.

Recurring themes and questions will include synergies between green and grey infrastructure, strategies toward urban resilience, considering overlaps between infrastructure and public space, defining urban livability, questioning the relevance of traditional sector-specific planning and design processes and exploring new urban design models applicable to 21st century cities.

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A4688 Urban Design Seminar III B:
Public Space and Recombinant Urbanism: 
Grahame Shane.

This seminar examines how cities evolve and develop public space and density over time in cycles of expansion and decline. The emphasis is on the urban actors who generate these spaces. The first part of the course is based on a close reading of Recombinant Urbanism and an in-class discussion based on issues raised in the four chapters. Cities are seen as complex systems involving multiple actors, energy and information flows, resulting in diverse urban forms and systems of self-governance. The second part of the course concentrates on city models, Urban Design and public space case studies, tutorials and student presentations. Students are required to develop digital group presentations at the end of the semester modeling a city and selected public spaces that are assembled into a website based on the seminar research.

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A6835 Urban Design Seminar III C
:Asian Public Space Now: Geeta Mehta.

The intensity and scale of urban growth in Asia is one of the most exciting and alarming developments in recent history. Three cities that are the focus of this class, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Mumbai, are among the largest mega cities in the world. They are the engines of economic growth and cultural innovation for their countries, but are very different in form and content from their Western counterparts and from each other. As Asian cities engage successfully in the global economy, they are also dealing with critical issues unique to their countries. While Tokyo deals with the deepening economic crises and aging population, the skylines of Shanghai and Mumbai are rising with iconic buildings amid large areas that are still struggling to come out of poverty. The majority of people in Asian cities live as squatters and their number is expected to double by 2050. Thus Asian cities are also the arenas where the Millennium Development Goals of poverty reduction and environmental sustainability will be either achieved or missed. The case studies of Tokyo, Shanghai, and Mumbai are developed in this course through discussions, readings, videos, paper presentations, guest lectures and blogs. The urban form, physical and socio-economic infrastructure, and future plans in each metropolis are critically analyzed. Ways in which these cities respond to and are influenced by the issues of globalization, governance, environmental sustainability and social equity are compared to each other, as well as other world cities.

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A6901 Research II: 
Staff.

This course is available in the Spring Semester, for the further investigation of issues generated previously in the MSAUD curriculum. Students may work individually or in small groups. Required is a clearly stated program and schedule of study with a designated MSAUD faculty member as Advisor; and the permission of the Program Director.

Urban Design Lab at the Earth Institute Founded in 2005, the Urban Design Lab (UDL) is a research center affiliated with Columbia’s Earth Institute. It extends many of the research priorities associated with the MSAUD curriculum. The Urban Design Lab connects the Earth Institute expertise in the natural sciences with issues related to contemporary global urbanization. Its focus includes infrastructure, climate change, and public health. It serves as a resource for curriculum development and teaching in the Urban Design Program, as well as teaching support for the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and the Fu School of Engineering and Applied Science. More information may be found at http://www.urbandesignlab.columbia.edu.

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