The spectacular market bubble that has wreaked havoc on the traditional city appears to be uniquely a modern phenomenon. The contemporary city illustrates the gradual loss of the act of placemaking that the West - - and by extension the world - - embraced after the War.
There is a more fundamental question relating to the central role that land speculation plays in the making of our cities. Embracing such a position, we made it into a global brand of the pursuit of personal power at the expense of the human city.
And yet, the idea of the ‘moral character’ of the city has been fundamental from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant, Otto Wagner, Camillo Sitte and beyond to our present day. Design always aims at balancing the antagonism between the individual and community by providing a careful balance of public and private spaces and buildings as the framework for a productive and pleasurable life.
This studio will focus on the parallel trajectory that the ‘city’ and ‘art gallery’ follow in grappling to give visible form to absence. As such, it will focus on the meaningful contrast between the domestic and the industrial, suggesting as it may be that beauty and violence unfold as an implacable palimpsest.
The studio will look at design as a process that requires both remembering and forgetting. Students will study Dubrovnik, Split and Venice as a crucial laboratory of innovation in both gallery design and urban design.