ENQUIRY: The ARCC Journal
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An Archaeology of the Street: A Cinegraphic Analysis of Streets in Urbino, Italy
No full textThis article presents the issues, questions, and discoveries of an experimental design studio, conducted in Urbino, Italy during spring semester of 2013. Utilizing high definition video cameras and their digital ecosystem of hardware and software, the students focused on uncovering the identity, or genetic code, of the street by examining its spatial and temporal extension. An archaeological method composed of traditional spatial analysis, typological studies, and cataloging of elements provided the initial framework for a cinegraphic inquiry. What emerged was a sense that the street was an urban artifact––a place itself rather than merely a conduit or path between places––whose spatial and temporal characteristics informed our perception of the city. The street, perhaps only understood in our movement through its sequential elements and spaces, seems critical in shaping the city's identity. Traditional means of analysis by themselves are limited in that they only isolate fragments of a much more complex whole. Throughout the inquiry, we found that the digital analytical methods that were employed and the digital tools themselves provided new insight into the analytical process while expanding our understanding of the street and its relationship to the landscape and the larger urban fabric of Urbino. By extension, cinegraphic analysis may contribute to our ability to uncover the qualities and structure that constitute the identity of a city, or any place
An Interdisciplinary and Intersectoral Action-research Method: Case-Study of Climate Change Adaptation by Cities Using Participatory Web 2.0 Urban Design
Full text linkThis paper discusses the last segment of a three-year interdisciplinary and intersectoral action research on climate change and urban transformation. The project had, as one of its core missions, the role of imagining urban and architectural adaptations for urban neighbourhoods that would contribute to minimizing the negative impacts of climate change on people's comfort, health and safety. The first part of the paper describes the collaborative design and augmented participation method used in the context of Québec City, Canada. These include the design process conducted to imagine adaptation scenarios, the visual strategies undertaken to make these understandable for the population, and the Web 2.0 crowdsourcing approach forwarded to measure feasibility and social acceptability of the design and visualization strategies. The second part discusses three positive outcomes of the process. First, collaborative design conducted with intersectoral groups of experts constitutes a promising avenue to identify adaptations and evaluate their relevance. Second, crowdsourcing is a powerful tool to inform the general public about climate change including both negative and potential aspects. As well, the crowdsource model allows access to particular knowledge which empowered users to make changes around their homes and neighbourhoods or advocating action from their local government. Crowdsourcing is also an efficient tool to help understand what people know about the potential impact of climate change and how it bears on their comfort, health and safety. Third and finally, the design proposals and the evaluation comments generated by working closely with various stakeholders, along with the public on-line consultation, allow for the induction of pragmatic recommendations that can be used as decision aids by elected officials and civil servants to better prepare their municipalities for climate change.
Emerging Visions for Sustainable Urbanization
Full text linkHarsh critiques of the utopian visions of modernist architects have led many of today's designers to seek to fit their constructed responses into the mainstream culture (Schneekloth, 1998). While undoubtedly the works of most designers are grounded in the intention of making the world a better and more beautiful place, the underlying desire to fit in with the mainstream leads implicitly to confirming the status quo of the built environment. We believe that if designers are to move toward envisioning and creating more sustainable urban futures they must eschew the desire to fit in and carefully and methodically reconsider what is possible. To that end, in this paper we explore the motivations, methods and outcomes of five students in their penultimate design studio of the Masters of Architecture program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Using three measures, motivations, methods, and outcomes, as evidence we seek to understand how future designers, as they complete their education and embark on careers in the design professions, comprehend and envision an urbanization process that results in a sustainable urban future
„So it really is a series of tubes." Google's data centers, noo-politics and the architecture of hegemony in cyberspace
Full text linkIn recent years, the physical manifestation and infrastructure of the informational age has increasingly drawn the attention both of the popular imagination and of architectural theorists. This paper focuses on an aspect mostly overlooked to date, namely on its artistic representation. It provides a critical analysis of a series of data center photographs published by Google in October 2012 under the name "Where the internet lives”. The photographs are examined as carefully staged constructions of a specific imagination of information technology that, transcending a purely aesthetical or corporate critique, has broad political, socio-geographical and economical implications. A first analysis of their composition, digital manipulation and visual impact situates the images within a recent photographic current of the so called "anthropogenic Sublime”. The paper then zooms out to reframe the photographs as a continuation of the euphoric techno-utopian discourse that surrounded the popular dissemination of the internet in the early nineteen-nineties. This discourse hailed the internet as an inherently moral and emancipatory vehicle that, because of the non-physical nature of cyberspace, would liberate its users from traditional hegemonic dispositifs based on techniques of physical coercion. Tracing the transition from bio-political (Foucault) to noo-political dispositifs (Lazarrato, Deleuze) and discussing the inextricable connection between information technology, territorial conflict and socio-geographic inequality, the article goes on to account for the demise of the dream of a "bodiless and moral internet”. Finally, the data center images are re-read in more detail and discussed as part of the life-support system of a failed utopia - sustaining a popular yet reductionist understanding of the informational society and its key players
The Next Generative Infrastructure for Detroit
Full text linkDetroit has a wealth of empty space, though little intelligence or understanding of it. There is a global, morbid fascination with Detroit's emptiness. The media and design disciplines have mythologized it in imagery, and obsessively mapped and quantified it. Vacancy perpetuates entrenched social, economic and environmental disparities and inequities. Yet, in the midst of formal ‘right sizing' and informal urban agricultural initiatives, a constructive civic dialogue about the role of vacancy in the future of the city has yet to begin. Our transdisciplinary design research lab wishes to prompt the dialogue. A new urban geography and ecosystem are required. Vacancy is a new infrastructure for the city. Vacancy, as it manifests, in land, buildings and infrastructure, is generative. We recommend productive, temporal uses for vacancy, to generate the next urban form of the city. In the same manner that grid and infrastructure become generators of urban form and use, vacancy can guide future urban form in Detroit.We define infrastructure networks as the systemic and complex overlay required to support a city and its associated urbanized region. Connections occur largely through blue|green|gray+white infrastructure networks that span geographic, ecological and political boundaries. Vacancy emerges as the ubiquitous infrastructure in each of these typologies.This paper describes aspects of our current project to create sustainable community and the central role which vacancy plays in achieving that goal. In one neighborhood of Detroit, we propose interventions for energy, density, and nature, envisioning an alternative, equitable, and sustainable ecosystem for the city
The silenced voices of architectural discourse: promoting inclusion through qualitative research
Full text linkContemporary architectural discourse is primarily framed by institutional hegemony. Scholarly works written in a voice derived from this privilege inherently exclude the voices of those untrained individuals who inhabit the built environment. The field of architecture, most notably in the AIA's policies and positions, calls for more diverse viewpoints and a more complex understanding of the public's relationship with architecture. It is not possible to make this complexity apparent through the monolithic viewpoints of institutional scholarship. This essay explores a variety of more inclusive research methods established in the social sciences under the banner of qualitative research. We focus on how qualitative research satisfies contemporary research expectations more effectively than positivist institutional scholarship and how qualitative research has a specific congruency with the field of architecture
Border Patrol: Professional Jurisdictions in Sustainable Urban Environments
Full text linkAccording to the United Nations, our world is becoming more populated, more urban, more connected, more globalized, and more complex. With this physical and social complexity comes a need for increased coordination in negotiating our urban futures. Environmental design and planning professionals have worked for decades according to traditional institutionalized role structures. Sustainability”in considering a wider variety of stakeholders”promises not only to include more members in the typical design and construction team (e.g., sustainability consultants, community representatives, technical specialists, etc.), but also to change the jurisdiction of tasks (e.g., project management, decision making, design leadership, etc.) taken on by actors in traditional roles (e.g., owner, architect, contractor, etc.). This paper examines how a wider social concern for environmental and social sustainability has affected the design and construction industry. Organizational and sociological theories suggest that professions are "bound to a set of tasks by ties of jurisdiction... [P]rofessions make up an interacting system... and a profession's success reflects as much the situations of its competitors and the system structure as it does the profession's own efforts” (Abbott 1988: 33). Abbott also suggests that "larger social forces” affect the structuring of professional boundaries. Treating sustainability as a "larger social force,” this paper examines current understandings of professional boundaries in the planning, design, and construction of our environments. It answers questions of how professionals renegotiate roles, responsibilities, and compensation when dealing with an uncertain change in traditional processes.The qualitative data stem from three university building projects. Each project was proposed ab initio without a mandate to achieve LEED Certification, but this complex criterion was subsequently added at different phases of design for each project. The in situ reconfiguration of existing responsibilities”and assignment of new responsibilities”shows how professionals integrate new practices and processes to achieve both environmentally and professionally sustainable futures
Green Measures... or, none of us are green until all of us are green
Full text linkThis paper introduces a re-consideration of the tenets of the ‘triple bottom line' (economy, environment, and society) to contemplate the societal implications of the current successes enjoyed by the environmentally-sensitive design movement. Considering the tools that we use to gauge the successes of sustainable ambitions, this work proposes the ways in which we apply sustainable design metrics are fundamentally working against the tenets of the triple bottom line. When considered through the lens of society, and in particular the urban poor, the current trajectory of the sustainable design movement is one that may create voids where a sustainable urban future can not exist
Applications in Cross-Curriculum Teaching The Synthesis of the Design Studio and Building Technology Seminar
Full text link"Change or perish. You need to prepare yourself for a profession that you are notgoing to recognize a decade from now.”Thom Mayne, Remarks on building information modeling at the 2005 AIAConvention, Las Vegas, NVToday architects are faced with new challenges involving Integrated Project Delivery and associated digital technologies that are rapidly changing the way architects work. Collaboration is the key to this newway of working as architects discover that the management of buildinginformation requires new skills and methods in design.How do educators respond to this call? How do we prepare a futuregeneration of architects to thrive within a rapidly changing profession?Given these new models for project delivery currently being utilized by theprofession, a new pair of courses was created at the Southern CaliforniaInstitute of Architecture (SCI_Arc) for the integration of the designcurricula with a building technology course by emphasizing teamworkand the use of three-dimensional software. The aim was to develop newskill-sets for students while maintaining a deep understanding of designand built form. Educators have long struggled with traditional architectural curricula that inherently separate design and technology courses. This bifurcation, often times convenient and useful for the organization of aschool and curriculum, is of course at odds with the "comprehensive” nature of architectural education that is so strived for in most programs.This paper serves to show examples of an attempt to address this seriousissue within the first professional graduate school curriculum (3 1/2 yearM.ARCH) by bridging both the second year design and technology classesover a two semester span. The goals of the two courses were; to bridgethe gap between design and technology pedagogy, develop collaborativetools for students, investigate a comprehensive understanding of theintegration of building systems, and to finally produce a set of documentsthat demonstrate this ability and use appropriate three-dimensionalsoftware to facilitate the investigation.It is helpful to set the stage on the importance of this shift of educational methodology by outlining first the context of the current environment bothwithin the profession and the academic realms. Finally, I will attempt toreflect on the methods employed and analyze the pros and cons of theendeavor and discuss possible improvements
The prequalified competition - how are architects appointed to invited architectural competitions?
Full text linkThis article presents results from a study of prequalification in architectural competitions. The aim is to develop knowledge of how the organizer appoints candidates to invited competitions. Prequalification is a selection procedure used early in the competition process to identifysuitable candidates for the following design phase. Usually three to six teams are invited to develop design proposals. The overall research question in the study is about how organizers identify architects / design teams for competitions with limited participation. The methodology includes an inventory of competitions, case studies, document review and interviews of key-persons. Ten municipal and governmental competitions have been examined in the study. There are 375 applications from design teams in the competitions. 43 architect firms/teams (11 %) have been invited. In five of the ten competitions 19 informants have reported their experiences of prequalification. The informants responded to an interview guide with questions on the background of the competition, development of the invitation, and the need for information about the candidates, assessment process and experience from the selection of architects / design teams. The invitation emerges during negotiation at the organizing body, which includes discussion with the Swedish Association of Architects.General conditions, submission requirements and criteria for the evaluation of applications by architect firms are part of an established practice. All clients have an assessment procedure made up of two distinct stages. First they check whether applications meet the specific "must requirements” in the invitation. Thereafter follows an evaluative assessment of the candidate's professional profile, which is based on the criteria in the invitation. Reference projects and information from the referees are important sources of information in this stage. Decisivein the final assessment is the organizer's perception of the candidates' ability to produce projects of architectural quality, the ability to combine creative solutions with functional requirements and aptitude to work with developers and contractors