RECOMBINANT CITY

John Cunningham and Nicole Allen

Studio Outline:

Cities fail when planned as singular, deliberate objects. They are alive and evolving all the time. They are accretions of the separate ideal urban visions of millions of individuals, amassed over centuries, sometimes millennia. This evolution is a constant, almost surgical procedure of cutting, hybridizing, and rebuilding, which in plan resembles a palimpsest, and in section a collage. Great cities are defined by this process; continuously reusing and reformatting all generations of buildings in combinations befitting the current place in time, allowing that place to be contemporarily relevant while capitalizing on its evolved vernaculars.

This studio combines Rossi’s vision of the city, Piranese’s Instauratio Urbis, and Jacob’s insistence on density and mixed use, and challenges students to insert unique housing typologies into new and existing constructions in Melbourne’s urban fabric. If Melbourne is to maintain its mantle as “World’s Most Liveable City,” while making accommodations for its rapidly growing population, experts must consider radical alternatives to the status quo of development, which currently consists of tacking on single family home suburbs to the city’s fringe, or constructing large-scale residential towers in the central city. These alternatives must be more nuanced, varied, and clever than their predecessors, taking into consideration the building of community, affordability, diversity and the real meaning of sustainability.

Studio Leaders

JOHN CUNNINGHAM received his BSAS from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and his M.ARCH from the University of Texas at Austin. From 2009 to 2012, he engaged in humanitarian work in Latin America and Africa with the nonprofit group Global Brigades, designing and building farming infrastructure, community centers, and schools for subsistence farming communities. Since 2014, he has worked for the New York-based SHoP Architects. His academic interests focus on the city as both a theoretical and physical construct, how its density affects its culture, how its appearance affects its experience, and how its evolution is driven by forces beyond our comprehension.

NICOLE ALLEN is an American architect, designer and educator based out of New York City and Melbourne, Australia. She is currently an Associate at SHoP architects where she specializes in the interface between high-density mega projects and urban centers. Nicole holds a Master’s Degree in Architecture from Columbia University in the City of New York (GSAPP) and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her primary interest is advancing the practice of architecture to be a tool for creating social and ethical justice in growing cities. Nicole was born and raised in the gridded plains of id of Los Angeles, California.

Learning Outcomes:

During the semester, students will  study, interpret, and act on Melbourne through a five-part process:
(1) creating an interpretive map of an existing underdeveloped or under-served community,
(2) developing a three dimensional site model of that mapping,
(3) using sections and diagrams of their model to understand areas of high potential and missed opportunities
(4) designing a set of programmatic, massing and circulatory rules  to restructure the existing fabric of their site, and
(5) designing a prototype building within this framework.

The building must provide housing and 1-2 other programs. Students will design and develop interventions at all scales (sidewalk, street,  building, block) throughout the entirety of this process, and will use that work to inform their final outcome.

Reading and Reference:

• The City in History, by Lewis Mumford
• Collage City, by Colin Rowe
• Combinatory Urbanism, by Morphosis
• The LIfe and Death of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs
• The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, by Pier Vittorio Aureli

Field Trip

DATE: Week 2
COST: $0

ST1/22 Monday 6:15pm - 9:15pm, MSD Room 140
ST2/22 Thursday 6:15pm - 9:15pm, MSD Room 142