ETH Zurich | DARCH | FS 2012
Prof. Alfredo Brillembourg + Prof. Hubert Klumpner
Coordinators:
Lea Ruefenacht
Haris Piplas
Start: Thursday, 01. 03. 2012 |
8.00 – 9.30 A.M. | HG G 5
Download Poster PDF
When?
Wednesday, June 6
15.00 – 17.00
Where?
HIL E 1
* all necessary materials for the exam will be available on the server, mid June latest.
How did cities develop into the cities we live in now? Which urban plans, instruments, visions, political decisions, economic reasonings, cultural inputs and social organization have been used to operate in urban settlements in specific moments of change? Which cities are exemplary in illustrating how these instruments have been implemented and how they have shaped urban environments? Can these instruments be transcripted into urban operational tools that we recognize within existing tested cases in contemporary cities across the globe?
Urban form cannot be reduced to the physical space. Cities are the result of social construction, under the influence of technologies, culture, the impact of experts and accidents. Ongoing urban transformation processes respond to those events, along with the imagination of architects and planers and the informal powers at work in complex adaptive systems.
Current urban phenomena are the result of an urban evolution. The facts stored in urban environments include contributions from its entire lifecycle. That is true for the physical environment, but also for non-physical aspects, the imaginary city that exists along with its potentials and problems and with the conflicts that have evolved over time. A critical analysis of the actions and policies is necessary to understand the diversity and instability present in the contemporary city and to understand how urban form evolved to its current state.
This lecture series will introduce urban knowledge and the way it has produced urban models and operational modes within different concrete realities, therefore shaping cities. Urban knowledge will be translated into operational tools, extracted from cities where they have been tested and become exemplary samples, most relevant for providing the understanding of how urban land scape has taken shape. ‘Urban stories’ identify case studies, produce documents and compile these in an archive. These will be used as templates to read the city and to critically reflect upon it.
Using a common lecture format through different perspectives, each presentation investigates a different city, revealing the relevance and the specificities of important plans and urban decisions in that context. The lectures series will produce a glossary with operational urban tools (three from each lecture) and will be organized in a time line with collected urban knowledge – an “improvised” manual to navigate theories.
For additional questions, contact: ruefenacht@arch.ethz.ch or piplas@arch.ethz.ch
