Realtime Urbanism

This design studio focuses on relational and ecological design thinking through interpretive, analytical, programmatic and generative uses of digital media. Emphasis on context, architectonics and systems in the design of a mid-scale building as informed by the analysis of precedents.

Expanding on this, the second semester of the first year of the professional Master of Architecture design studio will develop a critical and creative approach to the study of spatial systems and technologies, with a particular focus on how computation can be used to design new architectures, and is already being used to manage and control existing architectures, territories, and subjects.

In her introduction to the edited volume Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, sociologist and African American Studies professor Ruha Benjamin reminds us that technology captivates both bodies and brains. It captures bodies through vast and numerous surveillance practices, from dashcams to predictive algorithms. And it captures brains by enchanting the imagination and offering technological fixes for social problems. Extending this argument, we can also consider architecture as a technology that contains and seduces, by defining insides and outsides, and offering design visions to ‘solve’ social problems. To evade this technocratic trap, this studio will develop both technical and theoritical approaches to the study of spatial systems. We will understand the broad impacts of new and extant technologies by analyzing and experimenting with them. We will engage critical computational practices that extend the digital techniques learnt in Core I and anticipate the engaged and expanded forms of design that will be explored in Core III.

Specifically, students will be designing a facility for a new institution that is responding to complex global problems.