Seminar History and Theory of Urban Design: The City Represented - Visions of Urban Living

Abstract

This seminar takes a long-running architecture ideas competition and uses it to identify key topics in architecture culture. Studying the competition materials of the Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition (1965-2019) and mapping the complexity of knowledge exchange taking place within it, this seminar will open up new, cross-cultural perspectives on ‘housing the urbanite’.

Objective

- Identify major topics in architecture culture, such as metropolis, style, programme, historicism, and localism - Sharpen students’ comprehension of the architecture competition as an open platform of discussion - Create a better understanding of the process of transculturation prompted by a given design problem - Equip students with analytical skills and advanced research skills to find and interpret different library sources - Capture a multidirectional exchange of knowledge and visualize it using (digital) mind-mapping techniques

Content

Architectural history has long been narrated as the achievements of a select group of pioneering, heroic master architects. New perspectives prompted historians in the 1980s and 1990s to write a ‘critical history’ that eradicated the Eurocentric bias, followed by ‘global histories’ that started to acknowledge history’s worldwide dimensions. This seminar proposes to go one step further and develop and test an intertwined history of architectural ideas prompted by an international ideas competition originating in Japan. The seminar is first and foremost concerned with the production of new architectural knowledge that occurs when different cultures and interests come together. In particular, it explores to what degree ideas infiltrate or merge – in appropriated form – with the design knowledge of others. It will do so by traversing the Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition (1965-present), a yearly housing ideas competition that originated in Japan but has attracted entries from all around the world. Starting from its very first edition in 1965, you will investigate different competition themes and connect these to the wider architectural debate on ‘metropolis’, ‘comfort’, ‘style’, ‘programme’, ‘historicism’, ‘localism’ and ‘digitalization’. In parallel, you will explore the works and theories of well-known architects who posed the competition themes and served as the single judge, such as Kenzo Tange, Arata Isozaki, Richard Meier, Peter Cook, Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, Jacques Herzog, Toyo Ito, and Kazuyo Sejima. In addition to the competition brief, the particulars of the multiple winning entries and the judges’ final remarks, we will read primary and secondary sources to understand the historical and sociocultural context of the competition as well as its pre-, side- and after-effects on architectural debate at large. Questions we will address include; how did the competition theme come into being? Who has access to the competition? What is the mechanism driving the competition? What is the larger question at stake in a particular edition? How is the common design problem interpreted differently by its contestants? Did judging the entries influence the judge’s original perception? In what way did the competition theme resonate in different architecture cultures afterwards? During the first seminar class, you will be asked to choose one of the pre-selected competition editions on which to focus in-depth over the course of the entire semester. In the guise of a detective, you will actively gather relevant sources in the library that can contribute to the research questions posed above. Your semester-long research will culminate in a comprehensive digital mind-map that will be part of the final presentation. Course structure The course is based on weekly, two-hour seminars structured around a preselected edition of the Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition. In the first half of each seminar, the lecturer will introduce the intellectual-historical context particular to the competition edition under discussion. In addition, we will collectively carry out a critical reading of the competition brief and the judge’s final remarks. In the second half of each seminar, one pair of students will present in-class an analysis of the winning entries of that same competition edition. The student presentation will not only serve to illustrate to what extent the grand architectural vision of the judge transformed in multidirectional ways, both influencing and being influenced by interaction with a new cultural context; together with our assigned weekly readings, it will also serve to foster a group discussion on how the initial competition theme set by the judge affected the wider architectural debate, and vice versa.

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