London: A Particular Proposition

The Studio will look at London, a city where design ingenuity has been nurtured by the unpromising parameters of layered historic regulation, international trade and extraordinarily high land values. London is therefore a starting point for testing the more general proposition that design intelligence and wit should be better utilised to accommodate ideas of need and raise ambitions to the point where commerce values delight.The visit to London will therefore engage the Studio in conversations with the actual Producers (commissioners) and Directors (designers) currently remaking large urban tracts and consider how their visions are informed by different understandings of the city\’s past, present and future potentials. The site is Shoreditch, a dynamic district located on the edge of the financial City of London yet creatively engaged with the entrepreneurial City of Westminster, where the C21st opportunity is not to clear away, but to recycle, renew and overlay.Here the Studio will research the \’city sandwich\’, a project of the immediate future that responds to the programmatic, financial and civic need for a new urban architecture, one that reorganises the essential requirements for working, living and playing and consequently rethinks the structure of the urban theatre.The proposition is that a better understanding of the tension between site, opportunity and market helps describe critical design processes that rethink and reinvent architectural models and types. The challenge is to think and act as both Producer and Director. The project is the exploration of what these reconstructed models and types might be. Class Schedule: September– 1st, 2nd, 16th & 17th September 27th through October 1st — Field Trip to London October–12th, 13th, 14th, 26th, 27th, & 28th November–9th, 10th, 11th, 22nd, 23rd & 24th December–7th, 8th & 9th