The studio will investigate the intersection of two urban models - the Continuous City and the Discontinuous City - through the design of a series of mid-rise residential buildings situated in a residential neighborhood of Los Angeles. The Continuous City, characterized by clearly delineated urban spaces of streets, squares, and boulevards, was a dominant concept of urban form up until the end of the 19th century. In this model, every building is integrated into the form and structure of the street. The building façade becomes the sole mediator between interior and exterior. Architecture recedes into the background, and building type is subjugated to the larger urban form - with the exception of municipal and national centers, which are excluded from this system. The Discontinuous City, propagated by opening up the enclosed block at the beginning of the 20th century, is the diametric opposite of the Continuous City; in the Discontinuous City, buildings liberate themselves from the urban fabric. In this model, every building is an autonomous object independently displayed – a privilege previously reserved for churches, town halls, and palaces. Buildings have greater freedom in type, and are insubordinate to the form constituted by the larger urban order. Rather than viewing the Continuous City and the Discontinuous City as mutually exclusive models, the studio will investigate a hybrid between the two through the exacerbation of either planimetric or sectional extrusions - extremities within the respective Discontinuous and Continuous models. The coexistence of both extremities serves as an opportunity to promote an alternative form of collectivity through the aggregation of singular and detached buildings. THE MID-RISE The studio will utilize the mid-rise as the primary residential building type to investigate the hybrid between the Continuous City and the Discontinuous City. Although the design of mid-rise residential buildings has been evolving steadily, the programmatic effects caused by economics, zoning regulations, cultural identities, and geographies have been developing in a state of flux. These two trajectories propagate two design predilections. The first adheres to the efficiencies gained from repetition and interchangeability (often at the expense of flexibility and differentiation). The second relies on the idiosyncrasies gained from simulation and dynamics, often running the risk of jeopardizing efficiency and creating another form of rigidity. Instead of treating the spatial potential of the mid-rise type as directionally neutral, vertical or horizontal development of the mid-rise type will be exploited to the extreme through the act of planimetric or sectional extrusion. The collection of vertical and horizontal models will be posed as a new urban type constituted by autonomous buildings in a predominantly horizontal neighborhood in Los Angeles. In seeking to explore the relationship between the Continuous City and the Discontinuous City, the studio will begin by conducting research on built and speculative precedents - building types which embody characteristics of cohesion, control, and sanction of variations. A studio field trip to Los Angeles is planned in March to study the context of the site as well as the heritage of object-type buildings in the city.With this initial research, students will proceed to design a 50,000 cu M residential mid-rise residential buildings. Throughout the semester, the individual objects will be reinserted into the site at different stages of development to inform the overall design of a new hybrid city. The studio aims to achieve the diversity of individual identity, as a means for both unity and division in urban form. In lieu of a traditional analysis of site and context, performative dimensions of structural capacity, core distribution and climatic thresholds will inform the circumstances of planning and formal definition of each project and the collective site development.

 

 

 

 

 

Teachers

Neven Mikac Fuchs

Mark Lee

Nicholas Hofstede

Julie Aars

Sofia Cuhna

Kai Reaver

Bosheng Gan

David Kennedy

 

 

 

 

 

Students

Marco Cararo

Laura Cristea

Simon Indrehus Furuli

Yuan Gao

Ermioni Patsou Garamone

Dimitrios Giannelos

Mari Nysveen Helum

Federico Iannarone

Thomas Johanessen

Martin Login

Uku Miller

Marta Nicolin

Monica Pilkauskaite

Christiana Pitsillidou

Domante Pozyte

Julia Roditeleva

Juris Strangots

Emmanouil-Nikolaos Symiakakis

Anders Sølvberg

Anna Vallejo Clota

Mads Øiern