After successful completion of the course, students are able to understand the city as large form and to analyse its logic andules. They have eveloped the skills and tools for the analysis of the urban fabric and the elements creating its identity. Based on the result, they are able to develop design concepts for the city form on various levels of detail.
Studio crits every Friday, kick-off meeting March 3rd, 2022
Excursion to Paris (probably for March 28th to 31st)
The studio will be supervised by Umberto Napolitano, LAN architecture, www.lan-paris.com.
Paris 11th
In the spirit of Joël de Rosnay, who in 1975 called for the definition of a new tool for observing and grasping the infinitely complex, we think it is appropriate to develop a tool for building cities that is at once conceptual, methodological, and operational to enact these values and fulfill the current physical, social and environmental challenges of our cities.
The urban fabric of Paris and its buildings are a powerful source of inspiration for the design of this tool. Paris is the densest city in Europe in terms of population and human density - meaning inhabitants + jobs and among the 5 densest cities in the world.
At the origin of this model are the work and thought of a central figure, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. From 1853 to 1870, as Prefect, he completely reformulated the foundations of the city according to the values of modernity of the nineteenth century. If we consider the size of the urban fabric involved (75% of the built environment) and the speed of the works (in less than 20 years), we can easily consider its intervention as a new fully planned and designed city project.
With an eye to current challenges, one can decipher the properties of Haussmann’s urban fabric through a process of dissection, classification, and comparative analysis. At each level and according to each component, the urban fabric of Haussmann’s Paris expresses a set of characteristics guaranteeing several fundamental balances: density and viability, permanence and resilience, sobriety and diversity, connectivity of long and short distances, identity and universality , intensity and a welcoming urban spirit, and between attractiveness and inclusiveness.
This unit will study these features based on the experiences that students will draw from an housing project in the 11th arrondissement of Paris.
The goal is to establish a reciprocal link between the architecture and the city, and to thereby consider the architectural project as part of a larger composition where each piece expresses the values of the whole.
This is not an urban planning class, or a dogmatic exercise in the notion of context. Throughout this semester, we will erase the limits between the different scales and disciplines to place the architectural project once again at the center of urban challenges and opportunities.
“We realize that architecture only constitutes one aspect of a more complex reality, or a particular structure. At the same time, for being the most recent verifiable data of this reality, it represents the most concrete perspective possible for dealing with this challenge.”
A Rossi, The Architecture of the City, Opposition Books, Cambridge, 1984.
