MSD at HOME with Charles Waldheim
Online - ABP Zoom Webinar
The New Heliomorphism
The topic of solar orientation and urban form is both perennial and, once again, timely. The discourses and practices of ‘ecological urbanism’ have turned our focus to the terrestrial topics of hydrological connectivity and ecological function. Heliomorphism proposes to revise and extend the ecological urbanism agenda by returning to solar performance. Recent projects a number of leading architects and urbanists have suggested new forms urban order through solar orientation. In many of these projects, designers correlate the shape of the city to a complex and contradictory economy of solar performance.
The topics of solar orientation and social order, public health, and political economy were fundamental questions for many protagonists and projects of modern planning. In the wake of the collapse of modern planning, singular models of social urban order based on latitude and solar equity have given way to neoliberal models of market driven urbanization. The seminar returns to this archaic aspect of urban order, and presents its potentials through a range of planning policies and precedent projects.
Independent of location or latitude, access to the sun is considered an ancient and inviolable right in many cultures. The seminar reconsiders solar access in relation to social equity and it examines, accordingly, the tensions that exist between built form through capital accumulation and access to sunlight through environmental consensus. The energy crisis and economic shocks of the 1970s led to experimental and counter-culture practices of architecture and urbanism. The current environmental crisis embraces zero-carbon responses and has pushed the scale of operation to the scale of urban form.
Ralph Knowles’s concept of the ‘solar envelope’ proposed a design tool that anticipates contemporary interests in parametricism and relational modeling. The envelope offered a projective form through which urban morphology was indexed to solar performance. The technological developments of the last decade have enabled an unanticipated degree of precision and feedback, potentially infusing new possibilities into an idea that has a half-century of history. The seminar considers the changes, conceptual and projective, that contemporary models of computational geometry have brought to this design model.
Charles Waldheim is a North American architect, urbanist, and educator. Waldheim’s research examines the relations between landscape, ecology, and contemporary urbanism. He coined the term ‘landscape urbanism’ to describe the emergent discourse and practices of landscape in relation to design culture and contemporary urbanization. On these topics, he is author of Landscape as Urbanism: A General Theory and editor of The Landscape Urbanism Reader. Waldheim is John E. Irving Professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design where he directs the School’s Office for Urbanization. He is recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome; the Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship at the Study Centre of the Canadian Centre for Architecture; the Cullinan Chair at Rice University; and the Sanders Fellowship at the University of Michigan.
Presentation and Q&A
Date: Thursday 29 October 2020
Time: 12:00 - 13:30 AEDT* Melbourne (UTC +11)
Venue: Online - ABP Zoom Webinar
Event link: Once you have registered for the event, the event link will be sent to you via your Eventbrite confirmation email and reminder emails.
*Jakarta: Thursday 29 October 2020, 08:00 - 09:30; WIB
*Singapore: Thursday 29 October 2020, 09:00 - 10:30; SGT
*Dubai: Thursday 29 October 2020, 05:00 - 06:30; GST
*London: Thursday 29 October 2020, 02:00 - 03:30; BST
*New York: Wednesday 28 October 2020, 21:00 - 22:30; EDT
*Boston: Wednesday 28 October 2020, 21:00 - 22:30; EDT
*Los Angeles: Wednesday 28 October 2020, 18:00 - 19:30; PDT
Images: Charles Waldheim with the Harvard GSD Office for Urbanization, “Heliomorphic Seoul: Bioproductive Models for Inhabiting the Han,” 2018.