New Geographies Lab Research Seminar

The course invites the students to examine emerging agglomerations of settlement that that transcend the limitations of the global city, or cosmopolis.

Much of the literature about urban development today presents cosmopolis as the inevitable outcome of globalization with which we have to contend. World migration patterns towards the urban, collective ecological risks, and the global economy are generating intense but ultimately undesirable cities. We have benefited enormously from two decades of rigorous documentation and analysis of this condition, but this literature persists in describing these phenomena within the confines of nation states, through gradients of density and centrality such as urban-suburban-rural and with conventional land-use categories that overlook many of the radically different morphologies and typologies that are emerging. Ultimately, many of these methodologies compromise the originality and potentials of emerging forms of settlement.

The course starts with the premise that emerging agglomerations could provide clear alternatives if studied through different parameters and without the prejudice towards the “urban.” In parallel with a set of readings and discussions, the students will proceed to analyze specific case studies and to model them using larger regional and trans-regional criteria. The aim of the course is to generate a repertoire of new categories of settlement within which architectural interventions could be more effective.

Geography as Paradigm:
Increasingly designers are being compelled to address and transform larger contexts and to give these contexts more legible and expressive form. New problems are being placed on the tables of designers (e.g.: infrastructure, urban systems, regional and rural questions).

Problems that had been confined to the domains of engineering, ecology, or regional planning are now looking for articulation by design. This situation has opened up a range of technical and formal possibilities that had been out of reach for designers. The need to address these \’geographic\’ aspects has also encouraged designers to re-examine their tools and to develop means to link together attributes that had been understood to be either separate from each other or external to their disciplines. (For example, in the past decade, different versions of landscape urbanism have emerged in response to similar challenges).

Yet engaging the geographic does not only mean a shift in scale. This has also come to affect the formal repertoire of architecture, even at a smaller scale, with more architects becoming interested in forms that reflect the geographic connectedness of architecture, by its ability to bridge between the very large and the very small (networks and frameworks) or to provide forms that embody geographic references (e.g.: continuous surfaces, environmentally integrated buildings).

Curiously, while most of the research around these different attributes has tended to be quite intense, the parallel tracks of inquiry have remained disconnected. For example, the discussion about continuous surfaces in architecture ignores the importance of continuity of ground in landscape ecology. The seminar does not propose that a common cause is driving these different geographic tendencies but it does insist that a synthesis is possible, even necessary, in order to expand on the formal possibilities of architecture and its social role. The aim of the course is to expose the workings of this latent paradigm and to help articulate and direct them towards a more productive synthesis.