URBAN STUDIO
Project
Unit
Tutor(s)
Date
Award
Thin City 3 | Edit the 'City Proper'
URBAN STUDIO | Architectural Design 541
Dr Beth George & Dr Anthony Duckworth - Smith
2012 | semester 1
High Distinction
SYNOPSIS
Cities are an ever changing organism in a constant state of flux and reinvention; never completely finished and never completely reinvented. The urban design studio allowed us to rethink what our city is, proposing a non-judgemental reading of Perth to allow the city to be what it could be, not what it should be.
Based on Manuel de Sola-Morales' stipulation that “to draw is to select, to select is to interpret and to interpret is to propose,” the studio engages with a two phase structure: the conception of a ‘rule book’ and the unfurling of a design project that adheres to those proposed rules which seeks to make aware of the distinctive qualities of the City of Perth.
The act of design through active and bodily engagement with the city sought out the new forms of architecture appropriate for the emerging city:
"...this 'fiction' might effectively be its proposal." Manuel de Sola-Morales from the Culture of Description.
PHASE ONE
The 'rule book' phase consisted of a series of readings and lectures based on five theoretical cities:
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objective city
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figural city
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formal city
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subjective city
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picturesque city
The first four weeks involved studying the city's formal configurations, patterns, and processes through rigorous mappings. A territory was established to propose an urban insertion through the culmination of a set of rules / codes derived from the perceptual and analytical mapping of the 'City Proper'.
PHASE TWO
The project phase was then guided by the formulated rules / codes within our chosen territory. To respond and engage with the 'rule book' allowed the project to unfold itself; permitting to incorporate the site with specific operations involving well chosen cases of demolition, new construction, adaption, and substitution of program.
RULE BOOK'
The Constitution of a City at 32°S Latitude
We engage with our City in a certain kind of relationship; we judge it aesthetically claiming it to be beautiful or ugly, we like it and dislike it. It can be read from different perspectives but we perceive it to be an important source of identity to us when proudly saying:
“I am a Perthian”
To document the city through drawing constructs a personal and subjective mapping of the ‘City Proper’. The city is an urban text and must be read in order to be written; to produce “…architecture which might be seen as meaningful inscriptions on the body of the city.”
Each week the tools and methods to derive the rules are developed around the five cities to produce a unique reading. These findings comprised the 'Rule Book' ; a set of written principles to guide the subsequent proposition.
THE PROPOSITION
Through the mappings and rule book, Stirling Street was identified as the strongest armature within the ‘City Proper’ and the ideal site where all conditions are found.
the project speculates on the desires of Sitrling Street:
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as a road
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as a built mass
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as an urban terrain
