"The rhythmanalyst knows how to listen to a square, a market, an avenue."
In 2009/10 the MA Cities Design and Urban Cultures will focus on the relation between urban spaces and events. Rather than a system of surface signs or objects in space or a mere passive backdrop to the political spectacle, we will read the city as a reciprocal, indifferent or even conflictive relationship of spaces and events. We will investigate the urban environment as a complex reciprocity between actions and built form.
Summer Exhibition 2009 - Panorama
Mammatus Clouds are pouch-like cloud structures and a rare example of clouds in sinking air. Sometimes very ominous in appearance, mammatus clouds are harmless and do not mean that a tornado is about to form - a commonly held misconception. In fact, mammatus are usually seen after the worst of a thunderstorm has passed.
Urban Research & Design
Final Presentation, May 2009 (To preview some of the design proposals please see "Selected Student Works".)
Design Proposal
This year’s MA Cities Design and Urban Cultures continued the research about the relation between politics and space-making through the category of ‘the incomplete’. The abandonment of any urban or architectural project registers a moment of historical, cultural, political, economical or personal interruption and change. As much as it implies transformations and disruptions, the ‘incomplete’ provides us with a potential to register social change in built form. This year’s students investigated zones of urban conflict in Britain, Angola and the Gaza Strip. Both through their intense theoretical and historical research as well as their design proposals they aimed to engage architecture as a way of voicing critique in matter.
General research brief
Interview with Ines Weizman "The Potential of the Incomplete" (2009)
http://www.cityvisionseurope.eu/en/articles/show/interview_with_ines_wei...
A 'critical urban archive'
In this course students engage with several methods of analysis and research. Working with the concept of the 'critical urban archive' students investigate the multitude of issues regarding the arrangement and stratification of knowledge. The archive will provide a ‘library’ of knowledge that would become a core of the course's research culture. The idea is to, initially, emphasize urban formations in London that in the second part of the programme will be discussed, complimented and contrasted with examples investigated in studio trips or individual research projects.
Study Trips
Berlin, March 2009
Berlin, March 2009
Disquieting familiarities
Ines Weizman
"In order to grasp and analyse rhythms, it is necessary to get outside them, but not completely: be it through illness or a technique. A certain exteriority enables the analytic intellect to function. However, to grasp a rhythm it is necessary to have been grasped by it; one must let oneself go, give oneself over, abandon oneself to its duration."
(Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis)
Reading and Reflection
Student Marathon
Lectures delivered by students
‘Stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonised people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history.’
(Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism)
Critical Transformations, Student Marathon in November 2008
Lectures "Critical Transformations" 2008/09
Lecture Series delivered by Dr Ines Weizman (Autumn Semester)
Lectures "Critical Transformations" 2007/08
Lecture Series delivered by Dr Ines Weizman (Autumn Semester)
