11th EAEA Envisioning Architecture: Design, Evaluation, Communication Conference in 2013

Track 3 | Conceptual Representation | Exploring the layout of the built environment

Experience & analysis: composite drawing to reveal complex urban transformation

Bruce Johnson, Genevieve Baudoin

Keywords: site analysis; composite drawing; study abroad

ABSTRACT

The contemporary European City is made up of a nexus of historically disparate forces that range from radical industrialization, vast rebuilding due to war, the rise of new infrastructural systems, to the insertion of huge areas of temporarily occupied zones for World Exhibitions and Olympic Events. Many of these forces leave ruptures, scars and traces that can be read today. More than that, these forces are playing a pivotal role in the transmutation of the city into an emergent global urban condition.
This paper will discuss the methods of analysis and the documentation process developed in a co-taught study abroad program run in the summer of 2012. Using the Cities of London, Rome and Barcelona as a point of departure, the program examined in detail the evidence of the forces of change in the city through the use of mapping techniques and composite image making. Post-travel, the students participated in a documentation course, developing an analytical strategy for understanding their experience of the city. This strategy was framed by the larger lens of the evolution of cities and urban space, studying the role that technology plays in the integration of structure, systems and materials and how that might be a reflection of unique site or cultural conditions. The goal of this study was to develop a way of understanding an emerging urban tectonic grappling with these changes.
The nature of the city is changing and architecture students must prepare to address these changes. Sketching and traveling has traditionally been seen as crucial to any architectural student. But what is the role of drawing today for the architect? Do we understand the city through sketching, or are there different means to discover the nature of the City? Using James Corner’s innovation on the analytique developed in Taking Measures Across the American Landscape, the students were given this composite drawing method as a model for their own work. They generated composite drawings investigating overlapping scales of inquiry (at the city scale and the building detail scale). By developing a method of analysis and documentation process for the students our intent was to concretize and re-process their experience in tangible terms. The representations sought to reveal an emerging and unseen condition of the city.

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AUTHORS

Bruce Johnson

Department of Architecture, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA

Bruce A. Johnson received his Undergraduate Degree in Architecture from Kansas State University where he was awarded the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill Bachelor of Architecture Traveling Fellowship, which afforded the study of sacred architecture in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. In 1994 he received the Lowenfisch Memorial Prize for his Split Level Sod House while completing his Graduate Degree in Architecture at Columbia University. He has practiced with Stanley Tigerman and is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Kansas where his research focuses on direct fabrication and systems integration within the space frame structural typology.

Genevieve Baudoin

Department of Architecture, College of Architecture, Planning and Design, Kansas State University, Manhattan, USA

Genevieve Baudoin is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Kansas State University and a Registered Architect in New Mexico. She received her BA from Oberlin College and her MArch from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. She has worked professionally with both Foster + Partners and Antoine Predock Architect. She has taught previously at the University of New Mexico and the University of Kansas, before taking her position at K-State. Her research interests are in the changing tectonic relationship of site and structure in architecture, and in developing representational tools and strategies to understand and promote these complexities.

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