The dawn of modernity, marked by the unprecedented speed and complexity of technological advancements, introduced a dichotomous situation in the approach to design. While projects from buildings to infrastructures were getting bigger, the design disciplines themselves were becoming increasingly specialized, a process of delamination spurred by the incommensurability of modernity. The race for the superlative introduced a new scale into the urban realm. In particular, mobility infrastructure became a lasting physical imprint of this optimism whose unintended result was the production of urban spaces that were sometimes sublime, often conflicting, and never really resolved. The role of the architect, then, has constantly been to negotiate between the indomitable scale of infrastructural impositions and the urban experience. How has this changed our mandate as designers and what are the methodological consequences to operating in this context? Beyond a certain size architecture is infrastructure. But what are the consequences of operating at this scale and how will this redefine the relationship between architecture and urbanism? The design research presented will begin to position architecture as a rapprochement between its (infra)structural performance and urban space.

Jeannette Kuo received a Bachelor in Architecture from Berkeley and a Master in Architecture from the GSD. She worked for Daniel Libeskind and ARO. She founded with Aziza Chaouni Kuo_Chaouni Design Collaborative which is involved in projects in Morocco and the USA. She was the Maybeck visiting Fellow last year at Berkeley and was visiting lecturer at MIT last Fall. She is currently a design critic at the GSD. Her research Infrastructural Opportunism studying the potentiality of infrastructure in the urban fabric received a PA award in 2006 and was furthered while a fellow at Berkeley. Her research was displayed last April at Wuster Hall, Berkeley.

ON RESEARCH METHODOLOGY: TOOLS & TACTICS

BROWN BAG LECTURE SERIES

organized by Prof. Aziza Chaouni