COURSE CANCELLED

Bjarke Ingels Group, KING Toronto Condos

ARC3712H F
Instructor: Robert Levit
Meeting Section: LEC0101
Thursday 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

This seminar will combine the close examination of new architectural and urban forms with related readings that capture the changing circumstances shaping the lived experiences of contemporary city-dwellers. We will examine how the experience of individualization and precarity, the overlapping pursuit of social distinction and the role of advertising, and new scales of development shape architectural modes of expression, the changing morphology of cities, and mutating building types. We will read authors such as Ulrich Beck (Individualization), Peter Sloterdijk (Foam City), and Alan Liu (Laws of Cool) as guides to emergent social realities molding experience and design production. Students will study a chosen urban or architectural artifact, and examine it in light of the themes of the seminar.

What are the newly emergent forms of city-making and the architecture shaping Toronto, Boston, Dublin, et al: cities in which large new districts are rising up, cities where older fabrics are giving way to denser, bigger forms of building? The overlap of large-scale land aggregation, new building types, and the imprint of new social imaginaries are recasting the form of urban landscapes and creating new architectural types and expressive lexicons. What is the nature of these forces and how do they interact?

The big scale of new districts dissimulate the scales of the historic city and that city’s look of cumulative development. Unprecedented innovations in type and urban form hide behind appearances of the conventional and the familiar, while new and large-scale buildings take on the form of strange hives of unitized expression (reprising but transforming such works as Moshe Safdie’s Montreal Habitat). Patchwork patterns, made from leapfrogging new districts through formerly suburban landscapes are recasting suburban malls as new mini-downtowns with their own related housing.

All of this development is taking place against the backdrop of new ways that individuals understand themselves socially and within new patterns of working and living. This seminar will seek to establish terms to understand some of the many forces at play in these new urban territories.