Spring 2008

ARCH 200B
FUND OF ARCH DESIGN
CREEDON

Sixty hours of lecture/seminar and 120 hours of studio. Must be taken for a letter grade. Introductory course in architectural design and theories for graduate students. Problems emphasize the major social, technological and environmental determinants of building form. Studio work is supplemented by lectures, discussions, readings, and field trips. (F,SP) 

ARCH 201/1
CASE STDS IN DESIGN
DAVIDS

Course may be repeated for credit. Three hours of lecture and five hours of studio per week. Prerequisites: 100A-100B or 200A-200B. Each section deals with a specific problem such as housing, high-rise design, interiors, community development. Studio work is supplemented by lectures, discussions, readings, and field trips. (F,SP) 

Extended Course Description

São Paulo’s Urban Food Park

Sao Paulo has the appearance of a vast, monotonous, dense uplift cut across by deep clefts…Every notion we may have about planning and architecture evaporates here. What do you do about cities with over 10 million inhabitants? You cannot do them justice with ‘normal’ planning or ‘normal’ architecture. That would suggest that the contemplative slowness of the plan or design would work here. In Brazil, action is chronically overtaken by events. No time for consideration, no time for reflection. That’s a European luxury, but here every municipal organization is powerless against the proliferation of the city. All that can be done is to keep things under control. Urban planning becomes a matter of policing rather than a political or cultural discipline.”

Wim Nijenhuis & Nathalie de Vriers in Eating Brazil

When Le Corbusier sketched a proposal for São Paulo in 1929, he visualized an aqueduct-like infrastructure of continuous residential buildings with highways on top that would contrast with the undulating contours of the surrounding hills. Its cruciform shape gave the city an armature that would order its future development. Instead, throughout the twentieth century the urbanization of São Paulo was notable for its rapidly accelerating pace and haphazard growth. By century's end it was among the world's largest cities and had been rebuilt four times: first in adobe, followed by brick, concrete and finally glass and steel. Until recently the city expanded outwards consuming more and more land, but a new urban trend favoring the regeneration of partially abandoned once vibrant neighborhoods has taken hold recently.

São Paulo: the Bras Neighborhood

São Paulo was settled as a small Jesuit outpost on a well-defined horizontal seven hundred and forty five meter high plateau fixed by the boundaries of two river valleys; the Tamanduateí and the Anhangabaú. The latter flowed in a valley that divided the hilltop plateaus in halves. The construction of a bridge over it in 1892, known as the viaduct of the Tea, and the resulting expansion set off development that transformed the village into an important city. The first Industrial development and working class residential districts developed towards the East, the former industrial region and the home to thousands of immigrants who settled there during the early 20th century. Development of major commercial areas beyond the limits of Sao Paulo’s downtown dates to the mid-1950s, when Paulista Avenue first became the address of choice for large banks and corporations. In the past half century, the development of densely occupied commercial cores has spread even farther west and southwest of downtown Sao Paulo, concentrating particularly along the Marginal-Pinheiros freeway. This growth corridor pulls both commercial development and opportunities for higher skilled jobs farther away from the downtown into areas not easily accessed by those who live in the working class neighborhoods of eastern Sao Paulo and who rely on public transportation. That these new commercial cores lack significant cultural history and exclude a large a portion of the population suggests that they are inadequate successors to Sao Paulo’s historic downtown.

The need to re-stabilize investment and residence in the historic downtown requires an equally magnetic pull from the east. The most effective draw would be generated by a growth corridor parallel to the Marginal-Pinheiros, extending from Guarulhos Airport southeastward toward Sacoma, and eventually to the port at Santos. The key import and export capacities of the corridor’s two terminal anchors provide a primary identity to that corridor: trade. Pari and Bras the neighborhoods the studio will study lie along the Tamaduatei river at a central point along the potential growth corridor.

Program: Urban Food Park

Located close to the Sao Paulo’s traditional Central Market, and an important access route to Sao Paulo’s port, Santos, “Patio do Pari” in the bras neighborhood, presently an abandoned site next to the Tamanduateí River will be dedicated to urban farming, hypermaket, weekly market and parking for customers, service and network distribution. The project will help to stimulate the latest wave of renewal and change in the city and to recover areas of São Paulo’s that are presently disused. The strategy to be employed will respect the voids that have been created re-interpreting them creatively through landscape strategies, ecological recovery of the Tamanduatei River, new public space and the introduction of new work and production facilities.

Method

The Bras neighborhood will be divided into as many areas as there are students; each will produce a photographic survey of an individual fragment and relate it to topographical information. Other issues to be mapped will include vehicular and pedestrian traffic, use and material patterns sounds and lighting levels and the smells, colors and form of Brazilian food. The results of their work will be collected together into a booklet. Groups of students will be making films, audio recordings and photographic surveys of Sao Paulo. Through visits to local construction sites, students will also be asked to analyze the urban landscape and to study local materials and construction methods.

Budget

Departmental funds ($500/student) will be used to subsidize travel expenses The trip will take place in the Spring Semester 2008.

Return Airfare to São Paulo with COPA Airline from LA are approx $850.

Lodging + food (approx. $60 per person/per day)

Monday 14th—Monday 21st of January

Instruction begins Tuesday January 22nd

ENTRY/EXIT REQUIREMENTS: A passport and visa are required for U.S. citizens traveling to Brazil  

ARCH 201/2
CASE STDS IN DESIGN
CHOKSOMBATCHAI

Course may be repeated for credit. Three hours of lecture and five hours of studio per week. Prerequisites: 100A-100B or 200A-200B. Each section deals with a specific problem such as housing, high-rise design, interiors, community development. Studio work is supplemented by lectures, discussions, readings, and field trips. (F,SP) 

Extended Course Description

infrastructure from Oxford Dictionary n: the basic physical and organizational structures (e.g. buildings, roads, power supplies) needed for the operation of a society or enterprise.

from TechEncyclopedia n: (1) The fundamental structure of a system or organization. The basic, fundamental architecture of any system (electronic, mechanical, social, political, etc.) determines how it functions and how flexible it is to meet future requirements. (2) May refer to system and development programs in contrast to applications. A computer system's infrastructure would include the operating system, database management system (DBMS), communications protocols, compilers and other development tools.

The studio proposes to investigate the possibility of a new urban morphology that is responsive to emerging complexity of the network of systems within growing contemporary urban landscape. Parametric Design Process, Digital computation from collected data, and qualitative analysis utilizing cinematic methods w/ precisely calculated scale and time-based method will be used as methods of investigation and design speculation.

Theoretical Framework
Like many fast growing cities, Bangkok and many cities in the Southeast Asia region suffer from the repercussion of the inability to provide growing network of infrastructure in order to keep up with the rapid increase in population. This proposal suggests a study for a possibility of a new urban morphology in which the hybridization of architecture in a city and network of infrastructure including a rapid public transportation system takes place.

Traditionally, despite the fact that architecture in the city has always been considered as a physical construct that is designed to efficiently tap into existing infrastructure. It has always been designed and operated largely as an additional node or figure emerges independently out of programmatic demands mostly driven by economic ambitions. As a result, many of these growing figures in cities like Bangkok rely on existing infrastructure to feed into them, creating a short circuit of supplies and a nightmare of stagnated spatial flow. The new morphology of this hybrid suggests a design process that operates in a larger and more expansive field, not an isolated figure.

Research-Based Exploration
In order for the hybridization to occur, the existing network of infrastructure must be thoroughly studied to understand the organic nature and performative behavior of the network as a system.

Generic VS Particular
The studio will put an emphasis on generic conditions of contemporary urban landscape as one of the twenty-first century phenomena. The design process proposes to look for an anomaly out of what is seemingly homogeneous, banal, and ordinary.

As opposed to nostalgic approach, the studio intends to understand cultural context as the foundation of understanding the urban phenomena at this moment in time. The process and method will reveal the ever-changing re-invention of contemporary Southeast Asian culture, contemporary urban lifestyle, its idiosyncrasy and its paradox, which is uniquely present.

Design Tools and Methods
The use of new media and digital technology aids the design process to identify behavior of the complex and organic nature of specific infrastructural system.

Parametric Design Process using digital computation from collected data to create complex lateral relationships suggests possible emerging, more comprehensible patterns and/or organizational models. Qualitative analysis utilizing cinematic methods w/ precisely calculated scale and time-based method will also be introduced as methods of investigation and design speculation.

Existing Infrastructural Network
Major systems infrastructure in Bangkok Metropolitan area include roads, avenues highway system, railway system, Bangkok Mass Transit System Skytrain (BTS), Bangkok Subway System (which is part of the New Mass Rapid Transit Network under jurisdiction of Mass Rapid Transit Authority of Thailand), and system of bus boat along the main Chao Praya River and Canal System.

We will also be working directly with a Professor in Infrastructure Planning, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Chulalongkorn University, Dr. Panit Pujinda, who can be a great resource and a lead to other possible relevant resources for our design exploration.

Site: The site is along the Chao Praya River in Ta-Tien, Bangkok. It was the site of a former World Bank, which is now proposed by the Ministry of Culture and Science to develop into a Discovery Museum.

ARCH 201/3
CASE STDS IN DESIGN
DALY

Course may be repeated for credit. Three hours of lecture and five hours of studio per week. Prerequisites: 100A-100B or 200A-200B. Each section deals with a specific problem such as housing, high-rise design, interiors, community development. Studio work is supplemented by lectures, discussions, readings, and field trips. (F,SP) 

ARCH 202A/1
STUDIO THESIS
STONER/UBBELOHDE

Students may take 202A or 202B but not both; course must be taken in last semester of the Master of Architecture degree program. Prerequisites: Three semesters of 201 and 209D. 

ARCH 202A/2
STUDIO THESIS
ANDERSON/DUBOVSKY

Students may take 202A or 202B but not both; course must be taken in last semester of the Master of Architecture degree program. Prerequisites: Three semesters of 201 and 209D. 

ARCH 202A/3
STUDIO THESIS
HO

Students may take 202A or 202B but not both; course must be taken in last semester of the Master of Architecture degree program. Prerequisites: Three semesters of 201 and 209D.