architecture - Sam Fox School - Washington University in St. Louis

Dean’s Letter
Architecture,
Washington University
in St. Louis
63
ARCH 711 ELEMENTS OF URBAN DESIGN
Patty Heyda, Assistant Professor
Carolyn Gaidis, Lecturer
DIMENSIONS OF THE URBANISTIC PROJECT
The Metropolitan Landscape is a term used to describe
contemporary urban agglomerations like St. Louis and its
surrounding areas. Metropolitan landscapes can not be
characterized by a single physical condition, but encompass a
spectrum of diverse urbanisms. These diverse urban forms vary
in the relationships of buildings to open space, in their scales,
patterns, types, and uses, and in the ways they articulate and
interact with each other and with linking infrastructures.
Developing skills and techniques in urban design requires
understanding the complexity of metropolitan landscapes
through perspectives from architecture, landscape architecture,
planning, development, sociology and environmental studies.
This course will provide the foundational concepts and skills
to enable students to formally engage this complexity while
negotiating criteria of design quality, sustainability, human use
patterns, and in-depth knowledge of systemic and inter-scalar
relationships of the metropolitan landscape.
Students will work primarily in groups envisioning the
transformation of 3 distinct urban areas from across the St.
Louis metropolitan transect. Through initial analyses of the
comparative sites, students will develop an understanding of how
and why these sites differ and what shapes them, while exploring
approaches to the urbanistic project that test their understanding
of the site’s underlying structures, scales, relationships and
spatial and programmatic potentials.
The studio is co-taught between an architectural/urban designer
and a landscape architect in order to reinforce and best support
the idea of urban design as a cross-scalar, cross-disciplinary
approach.
This course is required for all first year MUD students; it is also an
invaluable class for any upper level (500-600 level) architecture
student who seeks to enrich his/her architectural proposals with
a more integrated, site-specific approach to built and natural (sitewide)
systems.