IDEA WORK 08 09
81 Instructor: Selwyn Ting
The Program
For more than a decade the Global Studies Program in France has promoted a research-based approach to design, with field studies in architecture, urbanism, culture, and technology forming a foundation for the synthetic processes of the studio. This approach provides a coherent semester pedagogy, while fully exploiting the foreign experience as a comprehensive resource. To accommodate specific topical agenda, the studio traveled a full 31 days studying Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Bordeaux, Paris, Rotterdam, and Utrecht. New exposures were incorporated into the studio’s challenge to analyze and affect the subject city of Saintes, France. The Project
Saintes, the principle city, and once Roman capitol of the Saintonge region, is located about 100 kilometers north of Bordeaux along the Charente River. The project is centered in the Quartier Saint Pierre, comprising the city center and corresponding to the walled city of antiquity. The 4.2 ha project site is situated on the plateau above the medieval core. Once the center of the Roman-era city, it was occupied by the Centre Hospitalier de Saintes until 2007.
Student’s research explored the broad issues of historic and current urban growth patterns. Diagrammatic studies tested the systemic effects and potential of redeveloping a historical site in the city center. The latent possibilities of the site to mediate social, cultural, economic, perceptual and physical conditions were examined at various scales of influence, from local and immediate responses to long term urban and regional outcomes. The design project sought a strategy-based solution for urban problems and arguments formed in the research phase. Working towards a transformative urbanism, and based within the limits of the site, projects were encouraged to intervene through programmatic, infrastructural and systemic modification, and to provide a medium for study of the broader implications of architecture and the urban condition. Students explored plausible scenarios that were to be sustainable within an environmental, economic and architectural framework. |1| |2| shawn swisher
topic studios undergraduate
ARCh 402abcL Transformative Urbanism