ARC253H1 Study Guide - Winter 2018, Comprehensive Midterm Notes - City, Le Corbusier, Utopia
ARC253H1
MIDTERM EXAM
STUDY GUIDE
Fall 2018
ARC253 Lecture 1
CLOSE READINGS IN URBAN DESIGN
Intro to Urban Design
o Urban design is anything that goes beyond the scope of the project
o Responsibility to client
o Urban planning – design of city
o Arch – design of building, individual commission
o Can deal with urban groups surrounding the project
o Territorial/regional scale
o Mega territories
o Urbanization refers to the organization of the earth
o Even things thought natural can be highly structured, ex farms
Key Terms
o Suburban – implies not urban, but suburbs are also highly structured
o Urbanism – a field of knowledge that addresses ways of inhabiting and
producing cities, gathering insight from a broad range of practices such as
urban planning, urban studies, urban design, landscape arch and arch
o Urban design – a design practice that addresses issues beyond the scale of an
individual building or landscape project or commission
o Urban planning – a practice for coordinating and managing the process of city
building
o Urbanism is a field of knowledge, the others are practices
o Empirical and conjectural knowledge – from syllabus
Course organized thinking about these two types of knowledge:
o Empirical – observation, analysis of the world immediately around you ex
site analysis, observing and analysing then transfer to a design
o Empirical thinking and realism – engaging realistically, philosophical
context = only working with things can see and feel, ex no deeper
meaning to the cup of coffee and exists without you seeing it
o Conjectural – speculate and propose alternate realities
o Invention – a myth?
o Imaginations mixed with historical precedent
o Everything you see and interpret seen in lens of historical context
o Ex copying surrounding buildings
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
o Conjectural thinking and idealism – ex the coffee cup exists because
you hold it and experience it, and even when its not there it exists
when you think about it
o Understanding these terms and how they relate to each other –
important for assignments
Overview of lectures:
1 – Calculating Expansion
o Ebenezer Howards garden city – empirical, calculating, costs ex
o This empirical version of urban design
2 – Civic Art
o This guy believed cities weren’t just data, people living, how shape of space
affect ppls experience
o Influenced a lot of ppl even today
o Ex Raymond Unwin – designed and built a garden city, following Cetei’s ideas
o Conjectural, based on applying precedent to a new context
o Also analytical but not as much
3 – fuzzy science and the art of big ideals
o Le Corbusier didn’t like the garden city ideas
o Thought cities should be built influenced by modernization
o he’s also conjectural – but he’s not taking history, he’s taking his own beliefs
from his imagination
o In a way similar to cetei
o ideas affected urban renewal
o towers designing and organizing the suburbs
o Venturi Scott brown – learning from Vegas
4 – ideal cities within existing cities
o Long history
o Build an enclave in an existing city, diff from surroundings
o Approached in diff ways
o Empirical or conjectural
o Ex red Vienna – enclaves within the city
o Ex Toronto dominion center, diff than surroundings, on a platform
o Way that these spaces interact with its context, often are significantly related
to their context – an empirical ideal (contextual)
5 – contextualizing ideals
o Idealist notion that architects and designers can do good for the world
o ex Pruitt Igo – highly critical of idealistic thinking, and loss faith that physical
design can make life better
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
3 fuzzy science and the art of big ideals: this empirical version of urban design. 5 contextualizing ideals design can make life better. Critical of le corb and just dropping design into contexts without regard for surrounding: start look at ways to contextualize like an idealistic project, would contextualize their modernistic buildings. Rob krier: drawing inspired by sitte, method of typological thinking, shows a way a thinking, system of thinking. Ideas of socialism: libertarian socialism, utopia in latin = no place, separate form mainland, as an island garden cities = island separated from city. If socialism is about the body of ppl having control as apposed to private care of ppl ex. Civic art and unwin: design for garden city, politics turn into built form. Individuals living connected: unwin making the same types of drawings that howard was making .
