Elements of Urban Design

Elements of Urban Design is an advanced core studio for the post professional programs in urban design. This studio introduces critical concepts, strategies and technical skills associated with current thinking on urbanism, and speculates on the designer’s role in analyzing and shaping complex metropolitan systems. Applied research and lectures will inform a series of interrelated exercises that construct diverse hypotheses about new formal and experiential urbanities, across multiple scales of intervention and development. For the Fall of 2014, the Elements of Urban Design Studio will focus on how an expanded notion of housing and domestic space in the city can serve as the backbone of a much more integral urban project. The studio will test the capacities of the Manhattan block to accommodate greater densities with experimental typologies that reshape conventions of urban life.