Take a Walk on the Wild Side: learning from the city and beyond

Ugo La Pietra,  Domicile Cell, 1972.

GO TO COURSE LINK:  http://wildsidemejanarc.wordpress.com/

“Taking a Walk on the Wild Side: learning from the city and beyond” is about developing a contemporary set of research methods, documentation and means of public engagement that can serve to read today’s emergent urban culture.

Course participants will develop long term personal research projects to be presented publicly using alternative media, including video, performance, exhibitions, social media, publications…

The course is organized into two working subsets:

• The critical examination of the contemporary city and its evolution, as well as investigations into emergent cultural developments in the urban realm.  Subjects for study include public spaces and urban infrastructure, modern residential projects, informal housing, refugee camps, marginal communities and peripheral landscapes, experimental design and material culture.
• Introduction to methods in research and media communications useful to developing more critically profound public based investigative projects dealing with cotemporary urban contexts. Participants will develop long term personal research projects to be presented publicly using alternative media, including audio and video documentation, graphics, performance, exhibitions and installations, social media, and publications. Enrollment in the course provides access to the Institute’s material workshops and media labs, as well as professional support by the Institute’s staff.

Course Statement:

1. Learning from the City.

The tools of the architect are limited by the prerequisites of the profession, and experimentation takes place within a tightly controlled field of options.  Today’s clients are markedly different—privatized public agencies, transnational corporations, the luxury housing market—exist side by side with a diminishing industrial base, constricted resources and cataclysmic threats, both natural and manmade. Increasingly fending for themselves are the diminishing middle classes, and not far along the impoverished communities living on the margins of the global economy.

Though these skewed dynamics have always existed in the course of human struggle, there are no longer the political meta-structures that once waged ideological battles on behalf of the disempowered. Today’s architects are no longer ideologically, politically, nor economically capable of breaking these social-political deadlocks. If one looks back to the sixties and seventies, architects and architecture students broke ranks with the established institutions to formulate pro-active programs and utopian visions: the counter-cultural movements from this period struck at the core of the State and big national enterprises. The city and its surrounding environs became the sites of urban contestation and experimentation.

COURSE HIGHLIGHTS: FEATURED SPEAKERS, WALKS AND TALKS:

upcoming Walk and Talk in Venice 27-28 October, with Lorenzo Romito, founding member of Stalker Rome, who will be presenting the Biennale Urbana” a Walk around on the other side of the Lido and a visit to the Marinoni Theater  www.teatromarinonibenecomune.com —plus a full day visiting the 14th Architecture Biennale, Venice. (Nordic Pavilion Exhibit: Forms of Freedom: African Independence and Nordic Models at the Venice Biennale)

the CUBE, Fijjta-Botkyrka Konsthall.  A Joint Workshop with KKH Architectural Theory and History, KKH “re-motion” augmented reality workshop run by  Åsa Andersson Broms and Esther Ericsson and KTH Architecture Department with Tor Lindstrand.

tour of Vallingby, with David Grahame Shane, author of Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design, and City Theory, (London John Wiley and Sons, 2005)

David Rifkind TALK:  Italian Colonia Architecture and East Africa.

A presentation on Rifkind’s research on Italian colonial architecture in Ethiopia with a appraisal of current developments in East Africa. 2 September Hus 28, 2014

Displaying Frederik Kiesler: Workshop with Tensta Konsthall with Celine Condorelli, Marco Galofaro, Stealth. 2015.

weblink: http://www.metalocus.es/content/en/blog/frederick-kiesler-el-escenario-explota