The Actual and Its Double: Experiential Learning and the Historical Urban Fabric Pedagogically Considered
Abstract
This paper examines the role that the anonymous fabric of the historical city can play in the design education of an architect today. Since the last half of the 20th century architectural design education has displaced the currency of actual experience and prioritized the acquisition of and communication with an advanced representational language of form. Foreign studies programs that place students into such locations as Rome for a semester of intensive study are thus introducing a fundamentally different, even disruptive learning experience. How the experience of historical cities can be formulated into a design pedagogy that offers not just mastery of the discipline, but an expanded skill set to make more inventive and ethically capable future architects is the purpose of this paper.
The pedagogy that is proposed will foreground the experience of an historical urban fabric and the intrinsic physical and perceptual discoveries that it can offer through deeper engagement. Rome will be the laboratory, introduced together with Giambattista Nollis Grand Plan of 1748. A fragment or segment of the plan will be examined experientially to understand it intimately and determine its present-day differences: what remains the same, where and how it has been altered, and what no longer exists at all. With this contemporary iteration of the original fragment, the plan will be disassembled, as if a puzzle, into its various component parts and then speculatively remade. The result is an iterative collection of new urban fragments. Multiple solutions introduce a comparative methodology and allow associative connections to an expanded field of actual cities and places. The analytical and speculative exercise is then tested against the challenge of a design studio program and site that allows for a direct application of the methodology as a means of providing a solution.
The initial experience of Romes historical fabric is as a labyrinth whereby one must ultimately lose their way. In this sense all that has been familiar will be lost. Orientation and wayfinding will require an awareness of physical and spatial landmarks and their uniquely episodic relationships to the supporting fabric. Building this knowledge of incremental parts to the larger, not quite comprehensible whole is a cumulative process. But through it the student can build a bridge back to what they already know.
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References
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International journal of urban and territorial morphological studies; Grünberg Verlag, Weimar-Rostock, http://www.grunbergverlag.de/; Print ISSN: 2748–2812; Online ISSN: 2748-3134
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