ARC3016Y S
Instructor: Michael Piper
Meeting Section: L0108
Tuesday, 2:00pm - 6:00pm; Friday, 2:00pm - 6:00pm

Most buildings in North American are figured out long before they reach the architect’s drawing board. Most major decision s about how and where to build have been prescribed by a process we as designers know shamefully little about and by people who often know curiously little about design. This is due in part to a perception that these decisions – based on policy or financial issues – are outside the architect’s purview. As it stands, such decisions often follow the interests of the private entities who influence them, more often than not resulting in a city wanting for civic space or common good.

This research studio and thesis prep group will explore a political role for architecture. For our purposes, this means studying planning policy issues and real estate practices that determine where in the city to build, what kind of buildings to put there, and how such buildings will be produced. The goal of this work is to embed experimental design knowledge into such messy, real-life conditions of development, and urbanization with the ambition of creating possibilities for civic benefit.

Part 1, Weeks 1 - 6
For thesis prep will identify a particular planning policy or real-estate practice that effects building production in Toronto. After studying these conditions, students will be asked to critically assess that policy or practice and identify civic needs or desires that they leave unfulfilled. Students will then identify sites in the city that are implied by their analysis that will be the subject of further study and design. In parallel, the research studio will provide instruction about methods of analyzing the formal quality of dispersed urbanization and the political and economic conditions that contribute to its production. To study these methods, I will assign the studio a series of typologically recurrent sites in the Toronto area. Analytical work will include typological mapping at a regional scale, and morphological analysis at the site specific scale. To study the political context for these sites, students will make a gap analysis* of a policy that the city has initiated to transform these sites. This analysis will conclude with a series of typological design tests where students will explore methods of design that deal with incremental phasing of built form and parking landscapes in the context of diverse property ownership.

Part 2, Weeks 2 - 12
For the second part of the semester, students will apply the aforementioned analytical and design methods that were taught in the research studio to the site and policy/economy that they identified in the first part of thesis prep. Students will research these sites, and produce a conceptual design sketch that will, for most students, be used as a basis for their thesis project in the coming year.

* A gap analysis is a study of the difference, or gap, in between the desired outcome of a policy, and its present state