Notes

We have two class days in June and two teachers left for the rest of the semester. Grant left impressed with the amount of work most of you have done, your attentiveness, and your interest in the subject matter. We've worked hard to evaluate you all evenly and fairly and we've worked hard to adjust the lessons to what you all know and don't know OR what you can or can't do.

Working this way this semester has also gotten me to think about how I was taught and what we did to learn "urbanism". I was taught at UTA in a very different way from your design education. I never had a studio that focused on it because every studio that I took assumed that inside and outside are the same thing. The location, scale, shape, and function of a building was interrelated with everything around it and inside of it. I was taught a rigorously ontological approach to understanding my work and its surroundings. We had to make sure everything we did FIT into a specification (categorical description) of the project. Architecture started not at the envelope but where you could tell one thing from another. It always included the grounds around it. Architecture was projective both in how its practice impacted its surroundings and in how we were free to imagine what could be.

We're asking you to look carefully at the surroundings and be ontological in one particular way- the formal context of buildings- and we're asking you to ontologically specify other aspects as well but we preference this one. You're projecting the site out into the city, you're projecting the surroundings into the city, and your projecting (specifying) what the of all these forms, shapes, edges, boundaries, screens, traces, and flows can become.

Just as buildings can be considered as definable agglomerations of something like brick or rooms, you can think of urbanism as conglomerates of buildings and other urban elements such as streetscape, landscape, infrastructure, and traffic. Its no difference. How I work in making a lamp is the same as when I work on five miles of street (34th Street).