Design Studio Options - Kahn

PERFORMING GROUND

The studio focuses on examples urban open space type found in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). It asks students to oscillate their attentions (and intentions) across various scales to consider how landscape design with strategic urban ambitions materializes, in concrete, place-based terms. We will look at ways projects may be programmed to operate at multiple scales (i.e. to produce energy, reduce waste, channel flows, support infrastructure, manage loads, generate civic space, etc.) as well as how such performative programs complement and co-exist with the user-based programs usually adopted by urban developers. To frame its work, the studio conceives program as project performance and approaches site in terms of three areas --an area of control, area of influence, and area of effect -- and three time frames, valuing the “present-in-place”; understanding its historical formation; and speculating on future transformations that optimize existing potentials.

See full course outline here.