Overview

Now some seven billion bodies and counting, urbanisation leaves nothing untouched - it is a means without ends, a reproductive action without question or second thought. It is said that beyond a certain threshold, the inevitable force of urbanisation renders design inoperative - horizons replace cities in an expansion without limit or direction. Design becomes a matter of facilitation, the management of a process whose fundamental values remain beyond dispute. However, urban design carries an important potential beyond the consensus of practioners or the synthesis of expert knowledge, its ultimate vocation is to propose forms for our spatial and political co-existence.

As something that must be imagined before it can be realised, this proposition requires the cultivation of our creative and intellectual faculties as well as the time and space to project new possibilities. The Bartlett MArch UD is a space of experimental design and teaching located in central London that sets out to transform existing paradigms of urban design education. Currently, urban design conceives of relevance and experimentation in separate ways, either it repeats conventions of form and spatial organisation or it is swept along in a cycle of formal and aesthetic experimentation with little consequence. In an increasingly homogenised educational landscape, the challenge is to reconnect these two scenarios, to commit to an ethos of radical experimentation directed toward material social and political consequences.

Pedagogy

The programme brings together a new generation of designers and thinkers from across the world in order to provide a rich and challenging space for long-term research on urbanisation and design. Alongside research on the city of London, every three years a single geo-political region will act as a common object of inquiry for the entire programme. Individual studios work collaboratively on projects located within this region. Studio inquiry ranges across an expansive set of scales and bodies of knowledge culminating with a design project and thesis. Environmental and ecological questions are prioritised within a critical structure that embraces the dispersed, often paradoxical nature of contemporary urbanism. The curriculum introduces students to various fields such as archaeology, anthropology, ecological history, governance, law, media, philosophy, planning and political theory. Cross-studio dialogue is emphasised, as is a collective work ethic.

Located within a permanent studio space in central London, graduates will develop rigorous research proposals through experimental design work. Students will learn to synthesise information across multiple bodies of knowledge and work collaboratively in complex environments. Students will also develop skills in advanced forms of analysis and representation and be asked to develop a high-level of literacy in political theory, history and architecture.

Structure

MArch Urban Design (UD) uses a module structure based on a credit system where the total number of credits over one year is 180 credits.

At the beginning of the academic year, within the first five weeks of term 1, the students are requested to take part in three short and intensive workshops, followed by a fourth workshop at the beginning of term 2. After the initial period of five weeks, in the first part of term 1, the students start working, with their allocated tutors, on the four key modules of the course.

Modules

BENV UD 1.0 History and Theory of Urban Design
Credits: 40
Assessment: Coursework Term 1+2

BENV UD 2.0 Strategic Urban Design
Credits: 40
Assessment: Coursework Term 1+2

BENV UD 3.0 Detailed Urban Design
Credits: 40
Assessment: Coursework Term 1+2

BENV UD 4.0 Urban Design Report
Credits: 60
Assessment: Coursework Term 3 + summer term

Content

BENV UD
1.0 History
and Theory of Urban Design
This is a lecture-based module which provides the students with a general introduction to the history and theory of urban design. The content of the lecture series varies to some extent from year to year, to reflect the evolution of design programme topics, but it typically includes lectures on the history of urbanism (focusing on the last 100 years and particularly on contemporary developments) and on current theories related to urban design, such as space syntax, generative systems and theories related to the issue of sustainability.

The pedagogical aim of this module is to provide the students with an introduction to the history and theory of urban design, with specific emphasis on contemporary issues and on fields of knowledge that are pertinent to their design investigations.

The intended learning outcome of this module is for students to acquire a knowledge and understanding of the history and theory of urban design, as well as their application to urban design project work.

BENV UD 2.0 Strategic Urban Design
This is a studio-based module that leads the students, by means of a series of design programmes, through the successive phases of an urban design project, from the initial research and conceptual stage down to a strategic design proposal. This research and design project includes a field trip.

The pedagogical aim of this module is to make students develop comprehensive urban design projects that are both analytically rigorous and creative in terms of design.

The intended outcome is for students to acquire a knowledge and understanding of the range of urban design skills required for each stage of project development, from basic research to overall strategic design.

BENV UD 3.0 Detailed Urban Design
This is a studio-based module that leads the students, by means of a series of design steps, from the strategic urban design level of module BENVUD 2.0, to a detailed level of physical design.

The pedagogical aim of this module is to make students develop detailed urban design projects that are both analytically rigorous and creative in terms of design.

The intended outcome is for students to acquire a knowledge and understanding of the range of skills required to develop a detailed urban design proposal.

BENV UD 4.0 Urban Design Report
This module provides the pedagogical context for the students to prepare the final element of the coursework, the Urban Design Report, which consists partly of a design component and partly of a written component. Students are expected, with the support of their tutors, to be highly self-motivated in the course of this module, proposing their own topic of investigation and design. This topic can either be a continuation of the design work that was initiated earlier in the year within modules BENVUD 2.0 and BENVUD 3.0, or a completely new design project. The subject of the Urban Design Report is negotiated between the student and his or her unit tutors, in coordination with the Course Director.

Design component
The design part of the Urban Design Report is to be presented in the form of a pin-up presentation during the final end of year crit as well as in the form of a hard-copy portfolio.

Written component
The written part of the Urban Design Report is a 5,000-10,000 word illustrated document. It must describe the initial ideas that underpin the urban design proposal, the design investigation and associated information that has been gathered during the process and a conclusion that summarises the way in which the design work informs the initial ideas. The pedagogical aim of this module is to encourage students to engage with analytical rigour and design originality in an individual piece of research and design development.

The intended learning outcome of this module is for students to acquire a knowledge and understanding of the research methods and design skills required to produce a major written and design thesis.

Staff

The MArch Urban Design course is run by a full-time Programme Leader, assisted by a Programme Coordination Tutor. The design ‘Unit’ (approximately 10 students per Unit for MArch Urban Design) is the basis of design teaching and learning. Every Unit is taught by two design professionals who are part-time academics.

Staff teaching on the programme currently include:

Adrian Lahoud
Programme Leader
Send Adrian an email

Graciela Moreno
Programme Coordination Tutor
View Graciela’s profile
Send Graciela an email

Design Tutors

Ross Exo Adams
Yannis Aesopos
Aristide Antonas
Peter Besley
Hannah Corlett
Luca Galofaro
Beth Hughes
Platon Issaias
Sam Jacoby
DaeWha Kang
Jonathan Kendall
Claudia Pasquero
Marco Poletto
Davide Sacconi
Camila Sotomayor

History and Theory Tutors

Ross Exo Adams
Sam Jacoby
Graciela Moreno
Godofredo Pereira
Lorenzo Pezzani

Staff biographies

Programme Leader

Adrian Lahoud is Leader of the MArch Urban Design and Reader at Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. He was Director of Urban Design at University of Technology Sydney before moving to the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths to take up a role as Director of the MA. Adrian has also taught at the Architectural Association, London and Angewandte Vienna. Currently, his research focuses on questions of scale. His thesis ‘The Problem of Scale: the City, the Territory, the Planetary’ proposes the emergence of scale as a spatial, epistemological and political problem. Prior to this, he guest edited a special issue of Architectural Design titled 'Post-traumatic Urbanism' exploring the relationship between crisis, conflict and the city. His curatorial practice with the collective ‘N’ has been exhibited internationally, most recently in the Gwanju Design Biennale and the Prague Quadrennial. In 2012 he was named as guest curator of the Think Space cycle of architectural competitions.

Professor of Urban Design

Peter Bishop: Peter graduated in 1976 in Town Planning from The University of Manchester where he was awarded The Heywood Medal and the RTPI prize. From 1985-2006 he was Director of Planning, Architecture, Engineering and Real Estate in four separate London Boroughs. During this time he worked on major development projects including the initial designs for Canary Wharf, the BBC campus at White City and the redevelopment of Kings Cross. In 2006 he set up, with Richard Rogers, Design for London, the Mayor’s architecture studio and was appointed London’s first Design Director. In 2008 he was appointed Deputy Chief Executive of the London Development Agency, where he combined Design for London with the responsibility for London’s regeneration, land development and environmental programmes. Projects responsibilities covered the initial work on the Olympic legacy, public spaces for London and the regeneration of London’s dock areas including the London cable car. In 2011 Peter was commissioned by The Design Council to carry out a review on behalf of the Government on Design in the Built Environment. The "Bishop Review" was published in October 2011.

Since 2011 he has been a director of the architecture practice Allies and Morrison-Urban Practitioners and a consultant on cities to the law firm Berwin Leighton Paisner. Peter is a visiting professor at the School of Built Environment at Nottingham Trent University, an Honorary fellow of UCL, a fellow of The Royal Society of The Arts and a fellow of the RIBA. He is also a design adviser to the Mayor London, a trustee of The Building Centre and a member of The English Heritage London Advisory committee. He has lectured extensively and his book, jointly written with Lesley Williams, The Temporary City, an exploration of temporary urbanism, was published in 2012 by Routledge.

Studio Leaders

Ross Exo Adams earned a Master of Architecture from the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, NL, and a BS in Biomaterial Science from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has worked as an architect and urban designer in offices in New York City, Rotterdam, Mexico City and London, such as MVRDV, Foster & Partners, Arup and Productora. The final outcome of his Master thesis, supervised by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Elia Zenghelis, was exhibited at the Venice Biennale of 2006. He has taught at the Architectural Association, the Berlage Institute and Brighton University. His writing and design work has been published in several journals such as Radical Philosophy, Log, Thresholds, Project Russia and others. Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate at the London Consortium examining the concept of circulation in order to develop a political ontology of urbanization. He holds the 2011 LKE Ozolins Studentship awarded by the RIBA.

Yannis Aesopos is Chair and Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Department of Architecture, University of Patras. He holds a Master in Architecture, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University and a Diploma of Architecture with Honors, National Technical University of Athens. He is the Principal of Aesopos Architecture, Athens since 1997. He was Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture, Columbia University, New York and a Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellow, Princeton University. Yannis worked for Bernard Tschumi Architects, New York between 1992-95 and Santiago Calatrava Architects, Paris in 1991. He is currently an Independent Expert for the Mies van der Rohe European Union Prize for Architecture. He has co-edited Landscapes of Modernization: Greek Architecture 1960s and 1990s (Athens, 1999) and The Contemporary (Greek) City (Athens, 2001) and is completing Diffused Athens: Networks, Consumerism and Crisis on the urban and social transformations of Post-Olympic Athens. The work of Aesopos Architecture was presented at the 13th Architecture Biennale, Venice, 2012.

Aristide Antonas Greek architect and writer, Doctorat University of Paris X - Nanterre - department of Philosophy. DEA University of Paris I - Sorbonne - department of Philosophy Diploma - National Technical University of Athens - department of Architecture with a PhD on Philosophy, an associate professor of Architecture Design and Theory at the University of Thessaly, post graduate seminar director in the National Technical University of Athens and the owner of the Antonas office. Co-curator for the Greek Pavillion, Venice Biennale 2004, co-founder of the plural academic persona "Gregorios Pharmakis, presented in Barcelona Landscape Biennale 2006, Sao Paulo Biennale of Architecture 2007, Galleria Contemporaneo, Mestre, Italy, 2008, Thessaloniki Biennale 2009 and Gyoumri Biennale Armenia, 2010. Writer of 6 literature books in Greece, 2 theater scripts performed in Greece, France and Germany and essays distributed on various sites on the Internet. He designed vacation houses and presented non-commissioned architecture; the Antonas office was nominee for a Mies Van der Rohe award in 2009 and for an Iakov Chernikov Prize in 2011.

Assemblage has won a string of major international design competitions and commissions with the United Nations (UN-HABITAT) and governments of the Middle East. Peter Besley was born in Singapore, educated in Australia, and first registered as an architect in Edinburgh. Before launching Assemblage, Peter was a senior architect at Allies and Morrison, London involved with numerous leading urban design and architecture projects, including the London 2012 Olympic Games and legacy masterplan. Peter has previously run Units in the Master of Architecture (Urban Design) course at The Bartlett (UCL) and is a standing juror at the Department of Architecture, University of Westminster, London. Hannah Corlett studied architecture at the WSA and the Bartlett. Before setting up Assemblage in 2003 she worked on numerous celebrated projects with Will Alsop and Niall McLaughlin, including Peckham Library (Stirling Prize 2000), and the multi award-winning houses in Clonakilty and Hertfordshire. At Surface Architects she led the £9M London headquarters for Razorfish Inc.. Hannah is a standing juror at The Bartlett School of Architecture and the University of Westminster.

Luca Galofaro is a principal of the firm IaN+, teacher at the Cornell Rome program and at Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris from 2009. He obtained the Master degree of Spatial Science at the International Space University, UHA Huntsville, Alabama. He presents his works of spatial architecture at several conferences. He is author of four books published by Bruno Zevi´s collection of Universal Architecture and he contributes to various magazines on architecture.

Ian+ office won the gold medal for Italian architecture in 2006, was nominee for the Iakov Chernikov Prize in 2011, received a honorable mention in the category Built Environment for the Zumtobel Award 2012 and is a candidate for the Italian Architecture Gold Medal IV edition. Ian+ projects have been selected for many exhibitions including the Venice Biennale in 2000, 2004, 2008, 2010; ‘Instant Urbanism’ at the Swiss Museum of Architecture in Basel; the Brazilian Architecture Biennale in San Paolo; the London Biennale of Architecture; ‘Talking Cities’, Archilab (2000, 2001, 2002).

Founder and director of her own practice, Beth Hughes has worked on projects of all scales, public and private, around the world. Educated in Australia, she graduated with first class honours from the University of Technology Sydney where she later taught. Whilst in Australia she worked for a number of Sydney design practices (Lacoste + Stevenson, Gordon & Valich) and was lead architect for a variety of projects including the City of Sydney Public Library. In 2004 Beth joined the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, (OMA — Rem Koolhaas) in Rotterdam, where as an Associate she was responsible for a number of projects in London (White City, Commonwealth Institute), Latvia (Riga Contemporary Art Museum, Riga Port City) and the Middle East (City in the Desert, Jebel Al Jais Mountain Resort). In 2009, after over twelve years of professional experience, Beth started her own work, joining as partner at Point Supreme Architects in Athens, Greece. In 2011 Beth established an independent practice and is now based in Paris.

Sam Jacoby is a chartered architect who trained as a cabinet-maker and graduated from the Architectural Association with an AA Diploma. He has worked for various offices in Germany, USA, Malaysia, and UK. Since 2002, Sam has taught at the AA as a unit master in Intermediate and Diploma School, was director of the AA Spring Semester Programme, and is currently programme director of the MPhil in Architecture, Projective Cities programme. He further taught as a studio leader in the Bachelor of Architecture course at the University of Nottingham. Sam is co-author and editor of Typological Formations: Renewable Building Types and the City (London: AA Publications, 2007), co-curator of the exhibition Urban Futures: Ideas of the City at the UTS Gallery (Sydney, 2009), and guest-edited with Christopher Lee a special issue on urbanism of Architectural Design under the title ‘Typological Urbanism: Projective Cities’ (2011).

DaeWha Kang is an Associate at Zaha Hadid Architects in London. DaeWha completed his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture at Princeton University, his Master’s of Architecture at Yale University, and worked in New York City before moving to London in 2004. Since then he has worked on competition-winning urban design and architecture projects, including the Kartal-Pendik master plan in Istanbul and the Elk Grove Civic Center in California, United States. Currently, he is design director of the LEED-Platinum rated King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center and master plan in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Jonathan Kendall is a Partner and the Director of Urban Design at Fletcher Priest Architects, where he is responsible for masterplanning and urban design projects within the practice. He is an architect by training, having studied at the University of Manchester and the Bartlett, and is registered in both the UK and Latvia. He has worked on a number of large-scale urban projects from initial concept and feasibility stages through to the successful achievement of planning permissions. Most significantly, he has worked for more than a decade on the Stratford City masterplan, one of Europe’s largest regeneration projects, the residential district in which has formed the Athletes Village for the 2012 Olympics. Having won the international design competition for the new urban centre of Riga, he established and continues to lead a studio for the practice based in Latvia. He has also led projects in Brussels for the European Commission and in Abu Dhabi, St Petersburg and Bangalore. Jonathan has taught on the MSc/MArch Urban Design programme at Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where he is a Senior Teaching Fellow, since the course was founded in 1999.

Platon Issaias graduated in 2007 from the Faculty of Architecture of the Aristotle University, Thessaloniki-Greece with honours. He holds a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design (MS AAD) from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation-GSAPP, Columbia University (2008). He is currently a PhD Candidate at the PhD Program ‘The City as a Project’, launched by the Berlage Institute/Rotterdam in collaboration with TU Delft. The theme of his thesis is the urban development of Athens. In the academic year 2010-2011, together with Pier Vittorio Aureli, Maria S. Giudici and Elia Zenghelis, co-tutored the 2nd year’s post-graduate research studio ‘Labour, City, Architecture: Towards a Common Architectural Language’ at the Berlage Institute. He has lectured and published essays in Greece and elsewhere, most recently in DOMUS and the Greek entry on the 13th Venice Architectural Biennale.

Marco Poletto After graduating with Honors from Turin Polytechnic in Italy, Marco moved to London to study at the Architectural Association. He worked in London as environmental designer with Battle McCarthy before co-founding the ecoLogicStudio in 2006. Marco has lectured and taught internationally, has been Unit Master at the AA in London from 2007 to 2012 and Visiting Lecturer at the IAAC, Barcelona, and Cornell University, Ithaca. After writing many essays and articles he is co-author of “Systemic Architecture: operating manual for the self-organising city” by Routledge. In 2012 Marco co-founded the new AA Italy Global School in Milan and is now Unit Master in the Graduate Urban Design program at The Bartlett - UCL in London and Director of the Fabrication Ecologies research line at the postgraduate laboratory for advanced architecture, IAAC in Barcelona.

Claudia Pasquero Claudia is an architect, engineer, author and educator. She worked in London as architect for international offices such as Ushida Findlay Partnership and ErickVan Egeraat Architects before co-founding the ecoLogicStudio in 2006. Claudia has completed a public library in Cirie’ (Turin) among other projects and she has been exhibiting ecoLogicStudio work at the Venice Architectural Biennale in 2006, in 2008 and 2010, where she has been presenting three different interacting prototypes, investigating the boundaries between architecture, science and tradition. Claudia has lectured and taught internationally; Claudia has been Unit Master at the AA in London from September 2007 to September 2012; Visiting Lecturer at the IAAC, Barcelona since 2006; Hans and Roger Strauch Visiting Critic in Cornell University, Ithaca, NY in 2011/2012; director of CyberGardening the City AAMilan from September 2010; Director of Digital Fabrication: Fabrication Ecologies at the IAAC in Barcelona since October 2012 and Unit Master for the Graduate School in Urban Design at the Bartlett, UCL London since October 2012.

Claudia has curated many workshops and cultural activities like the Architectural Machines Symposium at the AA, the Fibrous Structures workshop in Istanbul&London, Prototyping the city in Turin, ICAMP in Messina, Tropic Playground in Linz, to name a few.

She has published independently booklets like the cyber-Gardens and the AA INTER10 09/10 book titled “World Dubai Marine Life Incubators”. All her research work has been published in 2012 by Routledge is a new book titled “Systemic Architecture”.

ecoLogicStudio ecoLogicStudio is an architectural and urban design studio co-founded in London by Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto. In the past few years the studio has built up an international reputation for its innovative work on ‘systemic’ design; ecoLogicStudio’s method is defined by the combination and integration of systemic thinking, bio and socio-logic research, parametric design and prototyping. Completed projects include a public library, private villas, large facades and eco-roofs; ecoLogic has developed prototypes and installations for the most important Architectural Biennales, including Venice in 2008 and 2010, Seville, Istanbul and Milan Fuorisalone; the metaFOLLY pavilion has been recently acquired by the FRAC Center in Orleans for their permanent collection. The work of ecoLogicStudio has featured in many international architectural books and magazines like the New Arcadians: emerging UK Architects by Lucy Bullivant.

Godofredo Pereira is an architect, writer and editor. He has an MArch from the Bartlett School of Architecture where he currently teaches in the MArch GAD programme and is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is co-editor of Detritos, a Portuguese experimental journal of art and critical theory, and editor of the book Savage Objects, published by INCM for Guimarães - European Capital of Culture 2012. His writings have been published in multiple national and international magazines and journals, and his research focuses on architecture, ecology and territorial fetishism.

Lorenzo Pezzani is a researcher based in London. His work focuses on the spatial politics and visual cultures of coloniality, human rights and media. After having studied architecture and worked as assistant curator for Manifesta7, he engaged in 2008 in the activities of the Centre for Research Architecture (Goldsmiths) where he obtained an MA and where he is currently PhD candidate. In 2010 he was a resident at the Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency in Bethlehem and he is now a research fellow in the ERC project “Forensic Oceanography” and a contributor to the on-going body of work “Model Court”. His practice-based research projects, moving across diverse disciplines and media, have been presented in exhibitions and talks at, among others, the 4th International Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam (2009), Tate Modern (2010) and Chisenhale Gallery (2011) in London, Henie Onstad Art Centre in Oslo (2011) and HEAD in Geneva (2012).

Davide Sacconi studied Architecture at the Università degli Studi di Roma Tre where he graduated with honors in 2006. In 2004 he founded Tspoon, a research based office that has been awarded in several national and international competitions for architecture, landscape, urban design and editorial projects. In 2011 he completed his post-graduate research at the Berlage Institute of Rotterdam, where he focused on territorial and large scale projects in different cultural and geographical context, such as Los Angeles, Beijing, Moscow and Athens. His final thesis project, developed at the Berlage Institute within a studio lead by Elia Zenghelis and Pier Vittorio Aureli has been recently published on Domus. In 2010 he had the opportunity to teach at the Strelka Institute of Moscow and in 2012 he worked at MVRDV (Rotterdam) on several urban design and large scale architectural projects.

Camila Sotomayor explores ruins as contemporary zones of architectural reanimation. Her work experiments with the processes of material transformation and visual representation. Having studied in Chile, New York & Italy, she completed her Masters in Architecture at the Bartlett. Her projects have speculated on the effects of time at scales ranging from the accumulated virtual decay of a domestic interior to the phased reconstruction of post-civil war Bolivia. Her PhD in Architectural Design at the Bartlett is investigating the concept of time-based design further by focusing on material decay at the microscopic scale, as an architecture that emerges from simultaneous growth and death. She runs the Department of Decay, a platform that integrates the fields of art, architecture, science and fiction to explore all matters of material ageing. Camila’s conceptualization and experiments with decay are the subject for an article published in the Design Ecologies Journal. She has been Unit tutor for the Bartlett School of Architecture’s MArch Urban Design programme since 2010.

Isabel Allen trained as an architect before joining The Architects’ Journal as Buildings Editor in 1996 and becoming Editor in 1999. She was a member of the Stirling Prize jury between 2003 and 2006 and has won numerous awards for journalism including PPA (Periodical Publishers Association) Editor of the Year and BSME (British Society of Magazine Editors) Editor of the Year. She is also an Honorary Fellow of the RIBA.  In 2007 she took on the role of Communications Consultant to Design for London, the Mayor of London’s Design and Architecture Studio and co-founded SuperGroup, a small but influential team of designers, architects and curators specializing in architecture, urban design and the public realm. Key projects include London Open City at Somerset House, Open City Bucharest and the London exhibition at Shanghai Expo 2010. She is currently Design Director of Hab (Happiness Architecture Beauty), which she co-founded with the television presenter Kevin McCloud in 2007. The company works with the UK’s best architects and designers to deliver large-scale sustainable housing and regeneration projects across the UK. The company has won several awards for design and sustainability and has seven live projects across the UK, totaling 280 houses, three community buildings and retail space. 

Robin Hunt is a journalist, academic, and researcher. After a career as a media journalist that culminated as an editor at Wired magazine he became Head of New Media at The Guardian in the mid-nineties where he put the newspaper online. He subsequently did the same for Time Out, Frieze and many corporations. He worked as a Futurist in New York with clients that included MTV, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and Con Edison. He is the author with the architect and water specialist Francesca de Chatel of Retailisation - the here, there and everywhere of shopping. More recently he wrote the Copycats report for the British Government which considered the issue of digital downloading. He is in the writing stage of a long project which has seen him recreate day by day the five month walk made by the English eccentric, Thomas Coryat from Calais to Venice; and Venice to Flushing in Holland. A sense of this trip can be found at his website, Betwixt Europe.

Alina McConnochie has a Masters of Architecture from the University of Technology, Sydney. Alina is currently based in London and works in practice at S333 architecture + urbanism. She is also a member of casual staff at the Architectural Association and UCL Bartlett where she teaches in design communications. She has also worked as a researcher and educator at the University of Technology, Sydney. Her recent research has investigated conditions of urbanism and typology through the use of digital technology. She has had work exhibited at Venice Biennale 2010, Prague Quadrennial 2011, Object Gallery Surry Hills and DAB LAB Research Gallery; and has had projects published in AA Files, Architectural Design: Post Traumatic Urbanism, MAS Context Journal, Architectural Review and Architecture Australia.

Studio

The Mediterranean

The distinctiveness of the Mediterranean is an issue of some dispute. Is it a single sea or many? Does the Mediterranean refer to a littoral, the plains, or hinterland? To a lifestyle or an ecology, to a moral geography or a physical one? The oft-used response refers to a shared climate and the cultivation of vines and olives, but in what way does ‘Mediterranean’ explain a connection between Cadiz to the west, and Qadisha to the east? What unique property reveals itself through the Mediterranean lens?

What then, is the Mediterranean? Every discipline will answer this question in its own way. A Mediterranean story told according to kinship structures and small communities for anthropologists; micro-regions or biotopes for environmental historians; naval technologies, charts and sea routes for oceanographers; surveys, vernacular building types and colonial master plans for architects and urbanists. Not to mention the significant disagreements within disciplines, or for that matter, those forms of knowledge transmitted through oral rather than written traditions, such as the migratory routes of pastoralists, the cultivation practices of farmers, or the navigation of fishing vessels. Within each frame of knowledge, a different distribution of relevant and irrelevant points will be plotted, in each case the outline of a different Mediterranean will unfold.

What is more important than Mediterranean distinctiveness is the question of what is at stake within this arena, if the problem found therein leads one far from the Mediterranean according to its classical spatial definition, so much the worse for definitions. Today, within two or three steps, even the most isolated event will quickly lead from the Mediterranean to the Mediterranean world.

1. Marseille

‘City as refuge’

Camila Sotomayor & Platon Issaias

Marseille is a city of survivors, exiles and refugees. Since foundation it belonged to those fleeing destitution and tyranny - it is a role that only becomes clear in moments of crisis. That role is clear today. This studio begins by conceiving of Marseille as both destination and refuge, a city politically charged by its relationship to the Mediterranean.

Rather than view the city as composed by accidental or informal forces, we understand Marseille’s development as ruled by stages, which reflect different political, social and cultural conditions. From the city-colony of the ancient Greeks to the port-camp of the Romans, from the medieval fortress to the city-port of the 19th century, from the first working class neighbourhoods of the industrial revolution to the welfare state projects of post-WW II, from the refugee camps of the Algerian migrants to the contemporary reality of a multicultural Mediterranean city, Marseille will be analysed through the particular architectural and urban systems that responded to the emerging political and social condition. These moments of interruption in the city’s social consistency, political organization and territorial reference will be understood as the fundamental elements of Marseille’s evolution into a ‘city as refuge’ - a destination for multitudes of immigrants, workers, forced and voluntary travellers from the Mediterranean and the European mainland.

Our archaeology for Marseille measures the importance of the city as an urban formation inhabited by traces of both an ancient and a recent past. We will look through history to uncover the successive layers of human presence in the city. This type of research constitutes a spatial strategy, which uncovers here and now fragments of the city’s social activity and political significance. This operation becomes the foundation upon which our project is built. This strategy demands a synthesis of material, one composed by the various fragments of our research - the actual configuration of the city, its history and geology, its infrastructure, and the architectural spaces that contained and represented the various subjects in different moments of the city. Hence, our research is not detached from the very essence of the project – the ‘research’ is not an informative or utilitarian component of our work, but the ‘project’ develops as such as to inform our view on the city itself.

2. Messina & Reggio Calabria

‘South to South’

Luca Galafaro & Davide Sacconi

The Mediterranean is a huge liquid boundary that divides and connects territories. It maintains differences and at the same time attempts to keep them together.[1] At the centre of the Mediterranean the imaginary line that divides North and South materializes in a few kilometers of salted water - a geographical border that separates Africa and Europe, the Italian peninsula (extreme South Europe) and the island of Sicily (extreme North Africa). The unit will explore a theoretical city constituted by Messina and Reggio Calabria, two facing urban constellations separated by a sea inlet - two coastlines or geographical limits that metaphorically embody the border as the fundamental condition of the Mediterranean Sea. Today this territory is a place where architecture has lost its fundamental role and the urban fabric has lost its formal structure to become a mere infrastructure for information, relations, services and commodities. A territory in which everything is provisional where billions of images and messages converge and interact without succeeding in building a common space, a new cathedral.

The studio will consider architecture as an instrument for the problematization of the territory, a heuristic device that allows the South to emerge as an autonomous political and cultural milieu. Rather than be conceived as a problem of underdevelopment with respect to the North, this studio will understand the South as an opportunity to critically re-asses and overcome the crisis within our hegemonic model of social, political, and economic development. We claim the South as a resource of human energy, memories and relationships, as a possibility for the future of Europe and the Mediterranean within a global world.

3. Beirut

‘The privatisation of the public: The architecture of education’

Sam Jacoby & Aristide Antonas

Beirut is an existing material fact and an exemplary conceptual system - a vital city in a weak state. At a first level it is emblematic of the states withdrawal from civic affairs - a phenomena that resonates beyond the Mediterranean. At a second level - a group of non-state actors have emerged as providers of physical, social and economic infrastructure. At a third level, Beirut is beset by a subtle polycentrism expressed in the relation between neighbourhoods and the omnipresent infrastructure of security.

While it is impossible for any comprehensive analysis of Beirut to remain ahistorical or apolitical, we enter into these debates from a consciously limited perspective. Positing that the economic and political dimension of education and knowledge is essential to understand and construct futures for Beirut, we intend to conceptualise the city through several interrelated scales. The scale of architecture, its specificity and the typological description of it; the urban scale, its configuration, its borders, its centralities but also the political and socio-economic realities that organise it; the national scale, Beirut’s role in the building of a nation state or as a capital city; and the regional scale, its economic and geo-political meanings to the Arab World and the Mediterranean and European Union.

Though a debate on and clarification of public spaces is essential for any discourse on the city including Beirut, a more rigorous and nuanced definition, taking into consideration the increasing private ownership and limited constituency that public spaces serve, is necessary. Therefore we propose that the role of education and knowledge can structure an effective framework through which the conflicts between what is vaguely termed the public and private or the common can be re-examined, in order to foster a debate on how different stakeholders and constituencies affect the formation of an urban plan and how we as architects can positively contribute by reasoning through the operativity of architecture and the means available to it.

4. Tunis

‘Farming Energy in the Mediterranean’

Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto

The dissolution of the dichotomy ‘artifice vs. nature’ opens new possibilities in the conception of the city from a non-anthropocentric perspective. Urban design can then be conceived as the breeding of relationships between industrial, agricultural, biological and social systems. Working on the emergent notion of ‘agri-urbanity’, this studio establishes a link between the instant/immaterial qualities of contemporary urbanism and the slow/material qualities that are the inextricable sign of the rural condition and its life cycles. This studio begins with an examination of Tunis as a terrain for new practices of eco-social experimentation on a micro social [family run re-cycling workshop or migrant worker’s market garden] and larger institutional scale [introduction of self-organized energy grids, urban recycling networks]. The studio will focus on the conception of urban prototypes triggering and framing novel practices of farming energy and contributing to the self-sufficiency of the growing city. At the core of these novel energetic protocols we propose to identify a new conceptual persona, a political subject devoted to the creation of new urban economies related to an independent and robust supply chain for food, energy and transformation of waste. This persona is prefigured in the migrant worker, the refugee, the suspect, the political activist, and the nomad. Engaging this political subject will produce a new agency for architecture.

We propose to adopt algorithmic design methods to draw terrains of dispute across strategic and tactical forms of intervention; algorithmic coding enables us to test intentions across a fluid eco-social terrain, generating a multiplicity of responses and effects. Collaborating with scientist, sociologists, agronomists and engineers, student work oscillates between tectonic solutions, urban protocols and material effects.

5. Algiers

‘Precipice of change: a new DNA for the city’

Beth Hughes and DaeWha Kang

Once a fabled pirating town lording control over the Mediterranean, a strategic stronghold of the French colonial empire, and capital of the largest African nation, Algiers is now crumbling in decay, groaning under the burden of its inefficient and ill-conceived expansion. Recognizing the inadequacy of its infrastructure and the great inequality manifested in its urban fabric, the government has mustered the political will and ambition to address its problems and restore itself to former glory. Unsullied by the tourism and irreverent development that have overtaken the rest of the Maghreb, Algiers is on a precipice.

We see the Gulf recipe popularised by Dubai and exported to the rest of the world, as symptomatic of an urban calculus gone awry: focused on speculative profits today and leading to catastrophic failure tomorrow. The architectural language of these financial speculations is driven more by international iconography of luxury than thoughtful reflection on context; towers of glass and aluminum are dropped like dream palaces into scorching sandy deserts and freezing tundra without concern for local conditions. As this model sweeps through the world informing the progress of rapidly expanding economies, they yearn for the same shining economic model of urban growth. Already tempted by the gulf recipe with its promises for economic success and instant urban face-lift, Algiers is flirting with some dangerous images for the future.

Urban design is at a turning point, we must challenge our fundamental value systems and their existing development models. Somewhere along the line we have allowed the complex, messy, and rich urban calculus to be replaced by a derivative, reductive political and economic recipe: a recipe that sacrifices a secure future for the mirage of speculative profits today. The question for Algiers, before it is too late, is whether an alternative model exists, one able to deliver economic performance whilst responding to the failings of its past. In order to do this we reject the false distinction between the radical and the pragmatic, the revolutionary and the credible. We must redefine the terms of our engagement to find alternatives measures of value; in Algiers we have found the perfect site for these investigations.

6. Athens/Attica

Yannis Aesopos & Ross Exo Adams

To approach any city within the Mediterranean requires a precise, critical and constrained position–critical both with respect to the material we research, but also to our own methods as urbanists. For us, it is important to reject the journalistic impulse to capture a certain ‘dynamic present’ characterised by the spectacle of crisis we constantly see in the images reproduced in newspapers on a daily basis. In that same way, we also reject the flattening of the complexities and politics of Athens into an endless parade of mappings, data and information-for-information’s-sake, which has become the architectural status quo of urban research today. In rejecting these approaches, we choose to understand Athens strictly through a rigorous archaeology of its material formation; that is to say, through an archaeology of its urbanisation.

By ‘urbanisation’, we do not mean simply the production of the built environment or the growth of the city over time and space. Rather, we mean to identify both a process and a logic in which the concrete order of space and form is itself the basis from which political, economic, social and material conditions are created and mediated–the very same conditions whose effects are captured in the images of mass media or mapped in the drawings of architects and urbanists. Urbanisation is itself the medium which both results from and causes crisis; it is the process which perverts the notions of publicness and privateness alike; it is the activity which itself brings the theatre of war into permanent contact with society, it is the process which uses historical artefacts in order to flatten history into a consumable image; it is a spatial logic which attempts to reduce life itself into an economic calculation of housing and circulation, consumption and production, dwellings and infrastructure.

We claim that only by knowing the actual physical materiality of the city itself–through a deep understanding of the concrete morphology of the city as well as the legal, political and economic mechanisms of its particular mode of reproduction–are we able to construct a different history of Athens, one which immediately goes beyond the spectacle of crisis as well as the pomp of data. This approach for us is already a project in itself.

^[1] Franco Cassano, Homo Civicus, Edizioni Dedalo, Bari, 2004, p.108.

History Theory

History Theory Seminars

This seminar program sets out toward four areas of inquiry: the Mediterranean, the urban, the typological and the territorial. Each of which are understood as a series of problems organised according to scale. At the beginning of each series, an introductory lecture will present the dispute over the terms that make its title. A continuous lecture program drawing on a wide range of disciplines is scheduled for every academic year. This program draws heavily on the opportunities afforded by the program’s location in Central London to generate an intense culture of debate around urban design.

The Urban

‘Urban Design as a profession and a science’

Sam Jacoby

The second half of the nineteenth century saw the scientific urbanism of Cerdà pitted against a culturist city planning by Sitte, which were both later absorbed by the Modern Movement. With the Modernist urban planning doctrine charged with the decline of cities, the concept of urban design as an alternative reasoning of the processes involved in physically shaping cities consolidated in the 1960s. While in America its proponents, such as Kevin Lynch, Jane Jacobs, and Christopher Alexander, propagated practical architectural solutions with the aim to influence urban renewal through the design of public spaces and changes in policy, the European Neo-rationalist sought to recover the historical city, with Rossi formulating a new urban science that remained indebted to Modernism.

‘To Fill the Earth: Political Ontologies of Urbanization’

Ross Exo Adams

What is ‘urbanization’? More than any other theory, project or treatise, Cerdá’s General Theory of Urbanization can retroactively be seen as the most prescient paradigm for describing contemporary urbanization. This lecture will examine his work, covering both textual and visual materials, exposing his remarkably prescient theory in which he proposed to replace what he saw as the ‘anachronistic’ ciudad (city) with the ‘modern’ figure of the ‘urbe’, a generic, scaleless template of territorialization engulfed in expansive ‘urbanización’—a term he coined. It will examine the extent to which, as Cerdá had anticipated, urbanization has actually eclipsed the city, imposing an epistemological fracture between the two and effectively consigning the ‘city’ to a historical vestige. Central to the theory of urbanizacion is the concept Cerdá calls ‘vialidad’. This lecture will show how this term not only formed the basis of his entire theory but also provided the outline for a new configuration of modern power to emerge within it.

‘Spatialising Co-existence and the Problem of Unity’

Adrian Lahoud

This seminar will explore the twin-sided myths of unity and difference as they apply to urban discourse, where unity typically names the totalizing excess of modernism and difference names the attempted remediation of the city in the name of pluralism. It proceeds from a simple but important premise: questions of difference cannot be reduced to formal appearance. Beginning with the legacy of Rowe and Koetter’s Collage City in which questions of form, spatial reasoning and political rationality are severed, this seminar will turn to a forgotten high-modern urban project in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli by Oscar Niemeyer in which multiple rationalities addressing the formation of a modern nation state co-exist within a supposedly unified formal setting.

‘Utopia as a Structuring Principle of Modernity’

Ross Exo Adams

First published in 1516, Thomas More’s Utopia has given the modern world a lasting structure in which to project our horizon of expectation in imagining possible ‘elsewheres’. Within recent architectural discourse, the idea has become a kind of catch-all phrase to either refer to fantastical counter-worlds or to condemn supposedly irrational thought. In either case, ‘Utopia’ loosely persists as the non-real; that which cannot be realized. Proposing a more problematic understanding of the term ‘Utopia’, this lecture will trace a genealogy of political spaces and Utopian responses to them, from More’s work to contemporary understandings of the notion. In this way, it will look to reveal a tight unity between space, time and politics that operates at the core of any Utopian projection. Utopia, in this sense, does not just embody an ‘elsewhere’, but also carries with it traces of an ahistorical and, most importantly an apolitical frame. From here, another way to understand the term ‘Utopia’ emerges as u-topos, suggesting the negation of topos. Rejecting the ideologically loaded use of the term, Utopia today may be more effective if understood by Carl Schmitt’s notion of ‘spaceless universalism’. We will therefore look to expand our scope to interrogate not only ‘utopian’ projects per se, but also projects which have been realised that expose a certain tendency within modernity to liberate life from the concrete, material world. Far from referring to the ‘non-real’, is it not possible to conceive of Utopia as the condition approximated today as life is evermore integrated into a single, techno-economic (urban) continuum of movement, connectivity and ‘non-places’?

‘Biopolitics’

Tim Ivison

Biopolitics and biopower are concepts developed by Michel Foucault in the late 1970s to describe various strategies of the state to quantify and regulate the biological life of citizens through a paradigm of discipline and security. In this lecture we will revisit Foucault’s various reflections on biopolitics in his Collège de France lectures from the period, as well as the definition he provides in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, the Will to Knowledge. We will try to situate Foucault’s theory in relation to his own political moment, as well as introduce some of the key latter theorists of biopolitics and its relevance for contemporary social thought.

The Sea

‘The Corrupting Sea’

Peregrine Hordern

The Corrupting Sea is a history of the relationship between people and their environments in the Mediterranean region over some 3,000 years. It advocates a novel analysis of this relationship in terms of microecologies and the often extensive networks to which they belong. This is the first major work since Braudel’s The Mediterranean to address the problems of studying the area as a whole and on a long time-scale. The authors emphasize the value of comparison between prehistory, Antiquity and the Middle Ages. They draw on an exceptionally wide range of evidence - literary works, documents, archaeology, scientific reports and social anthropology. The themes addressed include past conceptions of the Mediterranean, its historiography, the history of primary production, the rhythms of exchange and communication, the pace of environmental and technological change, the geography of religion, and the contribution of Mediterranean social anthropology to an assessment of the region’s unity. The book offers a provocative and innovative approach to the history of the Mediterranean, explaining what has made Mediterranean history distinctive.

‘What is the Mediterranean?‘

Cyprian Broodbank

Ever since the appearance of Braudel’s first classic work and, recently, The Corrupting Sea by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, the scope and quality of large-scale interpretative syntheses of the Classical to early modern Mediterranean have stood in stark contrast to the lack of similarly integrated, up-to-date study of the basin’s immensely rich prehistory. This is despite the fact that almost all the fundamental social, economic, cultural and technological developments in this cockpit of world history originated and started to coalesce at a notably earlier date, and are therefore primarily accessible only through archaeology. The Making of the Middle Sea is conceived on an ambitious temporal and spatial scale that embraces a time-span stretching from the earliest Palaeolithic colonisation to the threshold of the Classical world, and addresses the African, Levantine and European sides of the Mediterranean in equal measure. It identifies a cluster of key features that in combination make the Mediterranean a genuinely unique theatre, distinct from other inland seas and ‘mediterraneoid’ environments, and weaves these together with the impact of climate change to explain the long-term human divergences and convergences in and around the basin that brought the cultural, social and political world of the ancient Mediterranean into being.

‘Mapping the Sea: Thalassopolitics and Spatial Practices’

Lorenzo Pezzani

Space is always registered through a medium. Many of the forces that condition the environment are poorly perceived, a critical question then, is how to make visible currently imperceptible phenomena able to transform the way in which we think and operate. This seminar will take the maritime environment as its main focus. In recent years, architects and spatial practitioners at large have often worked with activists groups and non-governmental organizations to map complex events and denounce new forms of spatial injustice. The vast majority of these endeavors, though, have focused on the bounded territories that define land and have largely ignored the ocean, often considered by classic geopolitical approaches as a placeless, and hence unchartable, void. Nevertheless, as the ocean started to emerge as a field of activity and research for military forces, global capitalism and scientific research, attempts to “know” the ocean have multiplied and have provided various actors with new oceanographic tools. In this seminar, we will look at how certain novel forms of reading and measuring the ocean by expanding the aesthetic and technological conditions of what can be considered (evidence of) a crime, have brought to the fore novel legal and political issues, transforming the sea in an arena of conflict.

‘The Mediterranean: A New Imaginary’

Adrian Lahoud

What is the Mediterranean? Every discipline will answer this question in its own way. A Mediterranean story told according to kinship structures and small communities for anthropologists; micro-regions or biotopes for environmental historians; naval technologies, charts, and sea routes for oceanographers; surveys, vernacular building types, and colonial master plans for architects and urbanists. Not to mention the significant disagreements within disciplines, or for that matter, those forms of knowledge transmitted through oral rather than written traditions, such as the migratory routes of pastoralists, the cultivation practices of farmers, or the navigation of fishing vessels. Within each frame of knowledge, a different distribution of relevant and irrelevant points will be plotted, and in each case the outline of a different Mediterranean will unfold.

This seminar will explore a large-scale and contemporary problem currently reorganizing the space of the Mediterranean, the nexus formed between climate change, desertification in the Sahel, trans-Saharan migration and European securitization of the sea. In doing so the presentation argues that issues of scale bound to concepts of regionalism or locality must be reconsidered and replaced in order to allow for relations that are no longer proximate.

Archaeology

‘History of the Present’

Tim Ivison

This lecture will address some of the key concepts in the critical method of Michel Foucault, dealing primarily with The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). Renowned for his unique form of historical epistemology, The Archaeology of Knowledge is a key moment in the development of Foucault’s methodology and the larger project of a ‘history of the present’. Controversial amongst historians and philosophers alike, Foucault’s often-radical arguments on historiography and theory are still debated today and this lecture will only be able to introduce the broad outlines of Foucault’s operative methodological categories. Some of the concepts covered in the lecture will include historical a priori, episteme, problématique, archaeology, discourse/discursive formation, archive, and power/knowledge.

‘The Life of the Archive’

Susan Schuppli

The archive is not, suggests Michel Foucault, the repository to which artefacts and documents are consigned in order that “they might settle and collect dust” on the contrary it is a site of regeneration that refuses the inclination towards torpor through the sustained “miracle of potential resurrection”. Artefacts when strategically extracted from the archive are likewise inclined towards deviance in the sense that they can testify against their previously authored histories — becoming in effect hostile witnesses to the past. Antoinette Burton author of Dwelling in the Archive argues that: “all archives are provincial, interested, calcified in both deliberate and unintentional ways; that all archives are in the end fundamentally unreliable.” Whereas Foucault’s reading of the archive insists that its tendency towards revivification is precisely that which constitutes its inherent vitality; a dynamism he locates within the very condition of unreliability that Burton finds problematic. “Far from being that which unifies everything said in the great confused murmur of a discourse, far from being only that which ensures that we exist in the midst of preserved discourse, it is that which differentiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies them in their own duration.”

‘Distance and Proximity: New Forms of Critical Engagement’

Lorenzo Pezzani

This seminar looks at (spatial) practices that have tried to go beyond a modern idea of critique as a practice of distance (the critical distance that would allow the critic to detach himself from the situation at hand and see things from afar) and have instead made of proximity/complicity a form of research and intervention in the real. To put it in Bruno Latour’s words, “the critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naive believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather.” By looking at various practices dealing with space and its representations, I will try to investigate what it means to produce “images, languages and signs are constitutive of reality and not of its representation” (Lazzarato) and what it entails for architects to engage with shifting networks of agency.

‘Scale as Apprenticeship, as Pedagogy’

Adrian Lahoud

Though it is both implied and brought into question with every form of inquiry, scale is a concept that has avoided conceptual examination in its own right. Thinking scale implies thinking a correlation of knowledge and practice to an object according to some proportion, where proportion always guides the scalar correlation according to some set of values. The conventional, ready to hand character of these conventions often obscures the values on which they are based and the conditions of their formation. Within architecture for example, disciplinary concerns have historically coalesced at a particular scale as a result of the questions asked, not because they are inherent to architecture as a kind of natural property. By attending to the formation of scale in response to conditions of material complexity, this presentation establishes a structure for re-thinking the formation of knowledge - not as a closed, ordered and unified body - but rather as a sequence of ongoing questions that radically conflate traditional scalar divisions of thought.

Territory

‘What is Territory?‘

Godofredo Pereira

This lecture will introduce the ambiguous and often contradictory uses of the term "territory" across several disciplines, differentiating it from the similar concepts of land and terrain but also body-politic and commons. Exploring territory’s different genealogies, the lecture will be divided in three sections: territory as sovereignty, as process and as network. Finally, by bringing these different strands together it will show how the term’s current ambiguity is in fact the reflection of a wider debate on the geopolitics of globalization.

‘Vertical Territory’

Godofredo Pereira

Departing from 19th century influence of geological and mineralogy discourses to political narratives and legal regimes, this lecture will introduce the notion of “vertical territory”, as a conceptual shift that foregrounds not only the importance of material agency to politics and history, but also the relevance of evolving technical and scientific modes of representation. Introducing the notion of ‘anthropocene’ as the discovery of a new global stratigraphic horizon, this lecture will address the growing relevance of territory’s vertical dimension as the manifestation of an epistemic shift whereby territory is no longer conceived in relation to the management of population, but instead in relation to the management of complex material circulations.

‘Jurisdictions and Sovereignty’

Lorenzo Pezzani

This seminar starts from the analysis of the transformation of the Mediterranean into an extended border zone and focuses on the sea as a contested spatial arena or as a paradigm of the friction between "notions of connectivity" (the sea as the space of capital expansion and global trade) and "spatial discontinuities" (the sea as extraterritorial space). Carl Schmitt famously described the sea as an anarchic space in which the impossibility of drawing long-standing and identifiable boundaries made it impossible for European States to establish any durable legal order or found any claim of sovereignty. Far from being a claim of commonality though, the concept of the “free seas” has been used during the centuries both by established and emerging powers to claim freedom of competition and the right to dispose of a space of commerce. It was, in this sense, a problematic but effective notion that had to be maintained thought active intervention of the various powers that claimed it. “Freedom requires policing and mobility requires fixity, and both of these activities require continual efforts to striate the ideally smooth ocean”. Nevertheless, with increasing interaction across oceans and with the growing drive to consider maritime areas themselves as resources, the sea itself has been more and more divided by various forms of legal and spatial enclosure. This process has been also closely related to the technological and scientific possibility to “know” the oceans, as the current interest in mapping the extent of continental shelves to determine states’ jurisdictions over Arctic resources has shown. As a result of this drive to subdivide the ocean, partial boundaries have been established to delimitate areas of decreasing sovereignty, hydrocarbon exploration fields, fishing regions, zones of responsibility for the search and rescue of persons in danger at sea, etc. The seminar will analyse this conflictual territory as a matrix of the contemporary spatial order.

‘Territorial Evidence’

Godofredo Pereira

In recent years several legal conflicts emerged where the main witness on trial weren’t people but material entities: samples of mud, oil or water, amongst many others. This lecture will discuss the production of “territorial evidence” as the investment of things with a power to speak in the name of a territory. Based on my own research of Venezuela’s recent shift in territorial politics and its reliance on heavy-oil classification, remote sensing and forensic procedures, I will show how techno scientific production of evidence is mobilized to substantiate political actions and legal transformations, thus intervening in complex epistemic conflicts over the control of land, natural resources and modes of living.

‘Circulation, Traffic, Nomos’

Ross Exo Adams

One of the fundamental structuring principles of environmental design (from architecture to urban design to ‘global planning’), this concept is often taken for granted as a self-evident category of spatial thought. Its appearance as an neutral, passive category belies a far more intimate history this concept has with modern political form. This lecture will trace a history of the concept of ‘circulation’ from its roots in ancient thought, as a mark of divine order, to its introduction as a cognitive model to be deployed in the organization of the material world, to its centrality as a principle within the construction of the modern, territorial state and its economic disposition. Its ‘emergence’ as the fundamental principle of the modern city, seen as a liberating notion, will in turn be problematized as a depoliticized historical aberration useful for the construction of a far more totalizing spatio-political order.

Typology

‘What is typology?‘

Sam Jacoby

Today we commonly understand typology as a formal classification according to use and morphology, with the origin of this functionalist-formalist thinking attributed to Durand’s didactic teaching at the École Polytechnique. An architectural theory of type, however, was only first formulated by Quatremère de Quincy in 1825 and derived from an encyclopedic systematization of knowledge and an art historical discourse. Despite their fundamentally different understanding of architecture, Quatremère’s theory and Durand’s method both conceptualized and utilized abstraction, and shared the desire to define a system of architecture with a new disciplinary knowledge. The epistemological similarities and differences between Quatremère and Durand are perhaps best understood through Le Roy’s first distinction between the history and theory of architecture.

‘Motive and Transformation: Semper’s Style and Unger’s Morphology’

Sam Jacoby

This is a discussion of two historical lecture series that were formed by the dichotomy emerging with Quatremère and Durand. Semper’s London Lectures of 1853–54 rethought type as a means to analyze history through a critical method of comparison and considered the evolution of artistic motives expressed in the formation of styles. Based on his theory of dressing (Bekleidung) and material transformation (Stoffwechsel), the lectures anticipated the arguments of the Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts (1860–63), an ambitious compromise between a material and conceptual reading of culture and its history. In the Berlin Lectures of 1964–65, Ungers developed a morphological classification of museums intended to be absolute and seemingly applicable to all formal and spatial types. However in his later theories, he shifted to an argument of morphological transformation and fragmented complementarity justified by metaphors and themes.

‘The Typo-diagrammatic and the Dispositif’

Sam Jacoby

Since Le Roy in the eighteenth century, typology can be defined as a diagrammatic function that is made specific to the discipline of architecture through drawing. This position was affirmed, yet simultaneously reversed, when in the late 1990s the diagram displaced typology in providing a generic organisation and the possibility of structural specificity. While the diagram remains formal-structural, and is often interpreted as a homogenizing process, Foucault’s dispositif or ‘apparatus’ suggests a heterogeneous system of relations that encompasses all human discourses and knowledge.

Ecology

‘From Sustainability to Radical Ecology’

Godofredo Pereira

Although recent years have seen ecology and sustainability emerge together within architectural discourse, this lecture will stress their distinct political and spatial implications. Departing from a critical analysis of the ‘Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change’, this lecture will distinguish concerns with the “protection” of nature and the “sustainable” management of natural resources, from conceptions of ecology where nature emerges as a political epistemological problem: not only it can no longer be divided from culture, but also there are not one but many conceptions of nature. Drawing on the parallel emergence of ecology and cybernetics, and from the writings of Bateson, Guattari and Escobar, a critique to hegemonic forms of development will be developed to argue how a radical conception of ecology isn’t one concerned with the sustainability of nature-as-resource, but one concerned with the rights to different practices of living.

‘Ecological Urbanism and the Immunization of Nature’

Ross Exo Adams

This lecture will problematize the ‘eco-city’ as a renewed attempt to imbue the crisis-ridden process of urbanization with a theological urgency: Here the ‘eco-city’ stands in as a figure effectively endowed with the power of staving off the end of the world. Indeed, what is truly new about the ‘eco-city’ and its various ‘sustainable’ cousins is not in its form, but rather in its rhetorical/aesthetic promise to incorporate ‘nature’ itself as an infrastructure whose ambition will inevitably push urbanization once again to the background of human consciousness—a fated processes of nature which can only be tamed by the good deeds of liberal reform.

‘The Development Doctrine’

Paulo Tavares

“First create need, then help” (Trihn Mihn-ha, in Reassemblage). The most powerful ideological construction we have inherited from the twentieth century is neither capitalism nor communism; it is “development”. No other form of perceiving and framing the world was able to command such universal consensus and gather partisans from all sides; left and right, revolutionaries and conservatives, liberals and totalitarians. Whether it was designed in the form of international aid from North to South or nationalist projects in the post-colonial world, governments from all factions and from all parts of the globe have claimed development as a political-historical objective. Religious missionaries, philanthropists and humanitarians have adopted development, on behalf of ethical imperatives, as their central mandate. Moreover, being ideologically consensual, development is also a “classless” belief, and enjoys unanimity among different social strata. While the rich consider it a moral duty towards fellow humans, the poor claim it as a right that has been historically expropriated or denied. Like any other event in the history of ideas, however, development is neither natural nor neutral but a well-crafted artificial construction. During the last seventy years or so, it has occupied a central position in the concerns of foreign aid-agencies of powerful states, global NGOs and the technical bureaus of the United Nations. It has mobilized huge amounts of capital and labour, and eventually generated its own circuits of knowledge production --- “development studies”. Given its moral righteousness, it is somewhat comprehensible that development enjoys such unquestionable hegemonic position. But its history tells us something completely different: development is an idea informed by a set of exclusionary cultural constructions that served specific political interests and economic goals and, in fact, development has contributed to expand rather than alleviate world poverty. What follows is a brief archaeology of the concept from its colonial origins to its modern elaborations, and some insights in one of its most powerful avatars: architecture and urban planning.

‘The Earth-Political’

Paulo Tavares

The history of modernity could be narrated as a longue-durée process of environing the earth. What we call globalization – that moment in history when financial markets, communication networks, energetic technologies, and ecological accidents turned into ‘world-objects’- is the last snapshot of that movement by which the planet was surrounded, up to a point in which that process has practically reached the totality of life, at least in rela­tion to what concerns the life of the human species and to that on which it depends: ‘global nature’. After the terrestrial globe initiated with early modernity/colonialism, the bio-spherical globe that emerges with late nineteenth century with bio-geography, and the eco-systemic turn of the 60s and 70s, we maybe experiencing the formation of new sensibility towards the planet, more geo-logical than territorial or biological, and therefore, a new reality in which the political terrain is no longer only the geo- or the bio-, but something I would tentatively call the earth-political. In the 70’s, when the ecological discourse was surfac­ing, geo-political power was disputed as a matter of reaching the outer space — escaping the Earth. Today’s crucial problem is that power will engage much more intimately and forcefully with the materiality of the planet, drilling deeper into the earth, scanning its hidden surfaces, trying to uncover sources of material wealth under melting glaciers and new discovered terrains — extracting, sectioning, dividing the materials that form our planet, re-articulating local and global ecologies. If ecology can be thought as political, its most urgent problem is not so much safeguarding nature, but challenging the hegemonic notions of nature itself and questioning the forms and means by which the earth is translated into the space of the political.

Applying

Application procedures, fees, funding and scholarships

Please visit the UCL Postgraduate Application and Entry page for information on how to apply.

Programme-specific information follows below.

Prior qualifications

The course provides a forum for graduate students from a variety of backgrounds - architectural design, the social sciences, planning, engineering, transportation, landscaping, geography and art history are all examples. However, prospective students should be prepared to engage with a course which has a strong emphasis on the design and visual representation of urban form, and so a background in a related design or visually-orientated field will be an advantage.

Candidates applying to the programme are expected to have excellent design skills; a familiarity with historical and contemporary debates on the city, well developed analytical abilities and a serious work ethic. Entry to the programme is highly competitive, priority admission is granted to students with exceptional portfolios.

As well as this diverse disciplinary background, the student cohort of 50-60 individuals also comprises a dynamic mix of UK, EU and international participants from all parts of the world.

Contact

Should you have any query on this programme, please contact the Programme Administrator, or the Programme Leader.

Opportunities

The MArch Urban Design provides the skills required in order to prepare students for further academic studies or for practice.

A student having completed the course will be equipped to undertake research in the field of urban design, and be able to evaluate or develop work in practice. Graduates of the course have gone on to pursue careers in a wide variety of fields, including:

• Further PhD studies and academia
• Urban design and planning practice
• Politics and policy
• Film-making, photography and creative practices

Graduates of the MArch Urban Design have, for example, gone on to become eminent urban designers in their own right as well as partners and practitioners of renowned architectural and urban design practices.