001 Atlas - Shuwen Xue, Xinyu Tang, Youfang Duan
003: Intervening a reimagining of the streetscape UVA SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE ALAR 8010 Research Studio | Street Life . Fall 2021
Schedule Propositions Launch: Thursday, October 14th The City of Berlin has undergone a broad range of changes in the past century. Fer- Final Review: Tuesday, December 14th menting over the last two centuries as a cultural capital the city has seen huge swings in the ideologies that have formed and reformed the city. The city is currently attracting a new wave of immigrants, from refugees from state violence to those seeking employment in the burgeoning tech sector. The once affordable city is slowly slipping out of reach, marginalizing a broad swath of individuals, and setting new trajectories for the future of the city.
The aim of the research studio has been to examine the reality and the limitations of the generalized notion of gentrification, and to develop a more nuanced account of its manifestations in concrete situations. For what is often dismissed as gentrification is sometimes better understood through other lenses, and perhaps evaluated in neutral or even positive terms rather than as categorically negative. Berlin neighborhoods have long histories that have seen successive waves of distinct communities, and the perception of loss is typically directed toward the condition of the city as one first encounters it—as something that is the “real” Berlin that must be preserved in its current state. The research agenda is to distinguish and discover various types of change—through their social, material, and spatial manifestations—and to speculate about the present and possible multiplicities within contemporary Berlin without reduction to a single valuation.
The final phase of the studio will ask for the development of a project that reimagines the streetscape(s) of an imagined, near future Berlin. The collective research and conceptual frameworks have produced a broad range of ideas centered on resistance, memorialization, connectivity, historical narratives, and exclusivity. Continually referring back to the disciplines of architecture and landscape architecture the projects will produce proposals that will convey a narrative/strategy about the gentrification in Berlin and the role of the street to produce forms of interaction, experience, and life.
As spatial designers we are attempting to find our space in Berlin via remoteness as we are scouring data sources, developing mappings, and proposing new relationships. This remoteness is the studio normal and by carefully navigating this condition the intent is to produce forms of architecture, planning, and landscape that capitalize on our removal from the physical site(s). How can we use the urban backdrop of Berlin to imagine how the design of the streetscape may address the topic of gentrification, speculating how public and private space may be connected, reconfigured, and programmed.
Method 003 will produce a proposal that formulates a position on gentrification in Berlin and how urban strategies, architectural interventions, and new material assemblies of the streetscape can rethink the future of public life in the city. This will be addressed through a series of questions outlined below. This outline is intended to provide a scaffolding for each person or team’s work and can be approached or appropriated in multiple ways. The objectives of this phase of work is to:
1. Develop a clear proposal that addresses spatial design’s role in the streetscape in a near future Berlin. 2. Produce an overall strategy that considers short and long term goals of the project. 3. Understand how urban planning, architecture, and landscape architecture can produce speculative proposals that reimagine the streetscape. 4. Produce an evocative representational strategy that captures the design proposition put forth by each student/team. 5. Form a platform for each student/team to explore their own research agenda as it applies to this studio. 6. Express a clear position on the topic of gentrification in Berlin and broadly.
Working individually or in pairs you will develop a design strategy that allows people to imagine an evolving relationship with the streetscape in Berlin. Using the three streetscape corridors documented in 002 as a starting point for the proposal, the proposition can expand out to the Greater Berlin area or focus precisely on a specific intersection depending on the goals of your project.
Implied in this proposal is that spatial design can influence and respond to this contemporary condition, bridging the gaps between the physical and the cultural, and the tangible and the perceived. Each of the following elements can be approached in any order and should be utilized to produce the broad range of work necessary to form the conditions, architectures, and landscapes you are proposing.
Position Using the work from 001 and your deeper individual research, develop mappings, diagrams, and visualizations that accurately reflect your position on gentrification, focusing specifically on spatial characteristics, strategies, and tactics. You may use writing as a means to express your position but this should be substantiated through the drawings, models, etc.
Strategy Develop a strategy for your project that focuses on the overarching goals you are trying to achieve. The strategy should have short term and long term goals, and can often have multiple ways to achieve these goals.
Tactics What are the actions that allow the proposal to form? The tactics focus on actions that concretely define the steps necessary to achieve your goals.
002 Media - Pavithra Bhaskaran
Precedents Carefully unpack precedents to understand their ability to convey specific concepts that focus on aesthetics, method, and technical procedures. These can be specific projects that you are choosing for their application of clear visual languages, material assemblies, or large scale strategies. It is important that this goes beyond a collection of things you “like,” instead it should be a way to contextualize your work within the design disciplines.
Implementation and Speculation The projects are speculative and function at scales that are difficult to comprehend. To ground the projects it is necessary to articulate how the projects are implemented. There are multiple ways to approach how implementation is developed for the project and it is typically necessary to show implementation across multiple aspects of the proposal. Implementation can consist of detailed drawings that show how materials are assembled or may be a long term management plan that is linked to a city’s political process. Take implementation seriously as a way to give projects constraints and to help an outside audience place the concepts within a plausible future. Implementation tempers speculation, using implementation as a way to push speculation through refinement and iteration. Be clear conceptually about the relationship the project is developing between speculation and implementation.
Representation It goes without saying that this phase of the studio is proposing spatial ideas. It is therefore necessary to produce site plans, sections, mappings, diagrams, and models (physical and digital) to fully explore and ground these ideas. Every project should have an appropriate range of representation that explains the fundamental spatial/tectonic frameworks of each project.
002 Media - Yulei Zhang
Deliverables The deliverables for this phase of the research are determined by individual projects and will be determined in consultation with the faculty.
Week 8 10.12 Fall Break 10.14 003 Introduction, Outdoor Classroom
Week 9 10.19 Desk Crits 10.21 Pin-up, Outdoor Classroom
Week 10 10.26 Working Session 10.28 Desk Crits
Week 11 11.2 Pin-up, Outdoor Classroom 11.4 Desk Crits
Week 12 11.9 Pin-up, Outdoor Classroom 11.11 Desk Crits
Week 13 11.16 Review and Discussion, Outdoor Classroom 11.18 Desk Crits
Week 14 11.23 Working Session - no studio meetings 11.25 Thanksgiving
Week 15 11.30 Desk Crits 12.2 Desk Crits
Week 16 12.14 Final Review 12.15 Final Deliverables Submission
Readings Mattern, Shannon (2018). Maintenance and Care: A working guide to the repair of rust, dust, cracks, and corrupted code in our cities, our homes, and our social relations. Design Observer, https://placesjournal.org/article/maintenance-and-care/
Marlen Hinze, Annika. Turkish Berlin: Integration Policy and Urban Space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
New Geographies 10: Fallow, Desimini, Jill. From Fallow to Wild
Rokem, Jonathan Rock. “In Berlin, Hyper-Gentrification Has Proved Just How Fast Conflict-Torn Cities Can Change.” The Conversation. Accessed October 14, 2021. http://theconversation.com/in-berlin-hyper-gentrification-has-provedjust-how-fast-conflict-torn-cities-can-change-126413.
Zerofsky, Elisabeth. “The Causes and Consequences of Berlin’s Rapid Gentrification.” The New Yorker, July 12, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-causes-and-consequences-of-berlins-rapid-gentrification.