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Pratt Institute School of Architecture Undergraduate Spring Rome Program Course Syllabus

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Pratt Institute School of Architecture Undergraduate Spring Rome Program Course Syllabus Arch 400i-402 Advanced Design Design Spring 2005 Class Credits: 5 Type of Course: Required Studio - Honor’s Program Class Meetings: T/TH 9AM-1PM & TH 2-6 PM Pratt Studio @ Santa Maria in Trastevere Prerequisites: Arch 301/ 302 or equivalent with at least a grade of “C” & Roman Form ARCH 420 – Honor’s Program Review Enrollment Capacity: 30 (2 sections of 15) Instructor’s Names: Anthony Caradonna - [email protected] / Richard Sarrach – [email protected] Course Overview: This course will initially focus on analysis of historic models to reveal distinct architectural patterns within Rome. Design processes will explore the transformation of Roman prototypes. Design issues include understanding urban form as an accommodation of the city's growth, and accretive intervention within a fragmented historic context. Studies will conclude with formal propositions within the context of the city fabric. Rome, the eternal city of cultural and historical treasures, inventions, influence and endless lessons, is a rite of passage for those privileged to reside in the midst of this living laboratory, and study, first-hand, the palimpsest of accumulated artistic, architectural and urban masterpieces framed and intertwined within the puzzle of the urban fabric. Pratt Institute's Spring Semester in Rome provides an opportunity for qualified students to live and study in this unique context. The lesson of Rome is one that goes beyond its strong architectural heritage. It presents a different culture, language and landscape, where history assumes a dominant role in the continuum of time. This is an environment, which generates particular responses, specifically toward people and toward an appreciation of urban place. The encounter with the city, a place foreign and yet familiar, profound and contradictory, is intended to site a reconsideration of design priorities. The investigation of the remains of antiquity and Rome's urban artifacts can offer a unique lesson; the interaction of physical cause and cultural effect on the built environment and its cumulative presence through time. The program undertakes an intensive study of the city's architectural and cultural history, providing the student with experiential insight into the precedents that have had an enormous impact on the development of architecture in the western world. This course engages the student in developing design strategies for architectural and urban intervention in a city which requires respect for the valued and respected integrity of its artistic heritage, yet yearns for and welcomes continuous investigation, reinterpretation and renewal. In the twenty-seven years that the program has been offered, it has always been intended that the contrast between New York and Rome would stimulate discourse and inspire re-evaluation of existing preconceptions. Learning Objectives: Conceptual translations: Ideas into space and material Accepting the platonic credo that the unexamined life is not worth living, the4th year studio challenges students to develop a personalized, reflective, self-guided, conceptually-driven, critical, rigorous design process that is, directed, regulated and revised by ideas and strategies and formulated through research, experimentation, evaluation and transformation. This articulated process is intended to assist students in developing an autodidactic approach to life-long architectural education. It also forms the basis of critical practice where research, inventive decision making and the translation of an overarching concept into culturally responsive, responsible and innovative architectural proposals can meaningfully contribute to the existing, built and developing environment. Urban Dichotomies = Parts to Whole The universal space of colonial, post industrial cities like New York, where the abstract grid provides a legible, simple and repetitive urban fabric based on the Cartesian coordinates and where the homogeneous space of the city sets all architectural works within a continuum of repetitive modulation; city blocks and vehicular streets, negligibility- quickly erasable and replaceable buildings, displacement by the electronic speed and demands of capitalism, real estate development and the technological culture of continuous obsolescence, expansion and transformation. In contrast, the figural space of the historical, pre-industrial, pilgrimage city is composed of unique individual built works and spaces which exist as recognizable, unique “places” defined by architectural elements- theatrically orchestrated, strategically located, interlocked and linked by a network of pedestrian pathways as destinations within the city. The identity and image of the city of Rome is understood through the inhabitation and interior experience of these very distinguishable and time-honored spatial and architectural fragments and pathways. Paradoxically the resulting palimpsest of the urban plan is an elusive and incomprehensible structure. Therefore, the urban fabric itself requires critical reading and reinterpretation and invites speculation, intervention and transformation. Students will engage in the architectural and urban discourse inherent in the spatial dichotomy of fluid, universal and figural space and develop strategies for researching, formulating a position, conceptualizing and proposing interventions that deal with these multiple readings of architectural space and develop approaches for addressing the enlightened past of the eternal city and the promising future of the twenty first century city. Students will investigate the relationship between the parts and the whole through the study of the historical transformation and layering of the architectural and urban form, through an understanding of urban infrastructure and its underlying organizational principles, through the relationship between buildings and urban space, and, through the study and transformation of specific roman building types and their constituent architectural components. The detailed development, planning and identification of physical elements and assembly strategies require a scalar focus that links ideas at telescoping levels, from the parts to the whole. Research & Analysis Students will capitalize on the wealth of historical examples at hand in the Roman built environment, through the focused study of existing, indigenous urban and architectural models, specific indigenous roman building types and precedents that have been examples of reuse, recombination, adaptation and transformation. The first month of the semester will be comprised of an emersion into two areas of research in preparation for developing interventional design strategies within the rich historical city fabric: The first month of the semester will be focused on examining the Pantheon in order to extract specific readings and lessons from the most influential building in ancient Roman building in architectural history. Reference to buildings influenced by the Pantheon will be cited and addressed where critical issues arise. The bulk of the semester will focus on the role of water and waterworks in the life and urban fabric of Rome. The Thermae and Balnae or public and private bath building types,specifically, in Rome, Ostia and Pompeii will be introduced and compared. Related water structures including the rivers, lakes, waterways, reservoirs, aqueducts, bridges, pools, fountains, piazzas, villas, gardens and sewers will be introduced to inform a more complete map of the ancient Roman hydro-infrastructure and of the rich context of life and history of water in the eternal city. Observational and analytical methods of drawing and modeling on-site and in-studio will cumulatively evolve into architectural and urban strategies for intervening on the site where the ancient Roman Pons Aemilius once spanned the Tiber River and its last remaining fragment now known as the Ponte Rotto still stands. Documentation and analysis of the project site will contribute to a deeper understanding of its past and potential development. Investigation A Architectural Research - KIT OF PARTS: Roman Instrumentatality PANTHEON STUDIES “As may be seen time and time again in a range of contexts, the Romans’ attitude to design was flexible: it was a matter of applying principles rather than fixed rules or recipes.” Mark Wilson Jones from, Principles of Roman Architecture The Pantheon is the crowning legacy of the development of the roman semicircular arch. The best-preserved monument of ancient Rome is also the most impressive symbol of the Roman Empire. It endures physically and continues to exert influence upon architecture as it has for almost two millennia. The first part of the semester students will study and disassemble the Pantheon in order to understand its component parts and how they contribute in framing this singular and unforgettably unique interior space in western architectural history. Phase 1 Disassembly: Skinning the Shell G.B.Piranesi’s infamous archaeological reconstructions and inventive analytical drawing techniques provide a useful tool for modeling the relationships of individual architectural components to a larger all encompassing work. His unwrapping of the mausoleum of Augustus?/Hadrian? flattens the circular drum structure into a linear elevation creating an unfolded reading of its shell and its constituent masonry units. Students will employ this strategy in order to explore the incremental, serial and episodic relationship
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