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Pratt Institute School of Architecture, Undergraduate Spring Rome Program Arch 400i-402 Advanced Design Course Syllabus Class Credits: 5 Type of Course: Required Studio – Honor’s Program Class Meetings & Location: 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: 34 (2 sections of 17) Instructor’s Names: Anthony [email protected] / Marc Schautt- [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 acretive 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, both 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 five 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, and, negligibility- quickly erasable and replaceable buildings, displaced 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 universal and figural space and develop strategies for researching, formulating a position, conceptualizing and proposing interventions that deal with this dichotomy 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 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 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: A Architectural Research Basilica / Palazzo / Piazza building types & programs B Urban Research Via Giulia in the context of the urban plan of Rome 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 and adaptation. The basilica building type, adapted by the Romans from greek prototypes along the agora, were first used as law courts and commercial centers. Later the building types were adapted to ceremonial and religious gathering and subsequently were transformed into the familiar Christian basilica. The Palazzo, which takes its name from the Palatine hill where the emperors of early Rome dwelled, was for a long time employed as a residential building type, an adaptation of the Roman domus. Later, during and following the Renaissance, public functions were also incorporated into the palazzo, which eventually symbolized large 3 or more storied buildings with both public functions and status, while still incorporating residential wings or zones. The piazza, the urban exterior public space which pervades and characterizes Rome’s urban plan, with its roots in the Roman forum, functions both as a destination space as well as a joint, channel or connector for other spaces and pathways within the city. The studio will ask students to collect and analyze several physical / spatial artifacts that can be understood to thematically underlie the city’s larger and more varied narratives.These prototypes and variants will provide students with a subject for a comparative method of incremental analysis. This will further allow students to develop strategies for adaptive reuse and transformation and synthesis of these urban building types into new architectural proposals. These reassembled fragments will become the basis for a synthetic architectural intervention to be located along the Via Giulia, itself a narrative link between the Ponte Sisto and Castel Sant’Angelo, developed by Bramante and commissioned by Pope Julius II. Drawing & Collage The applied arts are inherently charged with a frequently irreconcilable dialectic between form and function, theory and practice, idea and material. In theory, the tabula rasa is an idealized context where anything is possible and the context is mute. In practice, the built environment is not a blank slate but a minefield of conditions, constraints and paradoxes to be accepted, identified, embraced and evaluated. This context of Rome’s palimpsest provides fertile ground for critical analysis, creative thinking and making and inventive problem solving. Within this context, the conceptual and creative dialogue inherent in the design process requires designers to define, accept or reject specific conditions or positions in order to develop a working method. Since the Renaissance, drawing has been employed as a tool for thinking. This tradition within architecture connects the various disciplines that have informed each other and manifested
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