The Urban Plot: Play of XL Architecture

The studio starts with one's own neighbourhood, as its point of departure. Each student will understand and form the site using their most intimate knowledge and memories of the neighbourhood as notions of context are investigated at urban, architectural and human scales. We will challenge the students to understand the multifaceted way we can represent and narrate issues that help design architecture for and off the city. Understanding tools of narration and representations as key instruments of starting a design - our focus will be to generate an architecture from the ‘outside’ - where the idea of the public realm/ space, social identity and ritualized time become parameters that are engaged with. We will seek an architecture that reflects notions of preservation, cultural memory and identity as it simultaneously drives to engage with technological progress and new systems of production/ consumption that imposes programmatic variability. Beyond great architecture as an end goal, the emphasis of the studio is also to understand design as a process that generates questions - to address the present as we build for the future; to address themes of identity and global exchange as we understand and inflect your most intimate spatial and cultural practices.