One of the overarching goals of the studio is to introduce the students not only to the urban fabric, but to refine their analytic skills to analyze, review and incorporate art and design into their creative process. In addition we all need to figure where we were going this semester and make sure we were all moving forward together. The student syllabus and their selected readings is here.
The first design project was an exercise to do all of the above. We spent our first day analyzing paintings, then building on that analysis to reproduce and fill in the edges of the painting to imagine the setting it captured and the urban form it described. We took all of our plans and meshed them together into our own unique City of plazas. We filled in our city. What we found were the spaces in between the ones we drew. We found new places that interconnected the plazas we had developed from the art. These new spaces were then each assigned to the students. Everyone was tasked with designing a new pedestrian space. To imagine the context they had invented and to create a space using minimalism.
I think I was nice. We worked for 4 hours together on Monday, then I gave them the evening and the next morning to work their magic getting together at noon on Day 2 to see what they had come up.
What they came up with was an excellent discussion and definition of Minimalism. They defined the objective, built the rules and then tested all of their concepts against it. It was a good day, at least from my perspective. We spent the remainder of the time introducing "The Cut" and began in earnest on our next assignments. Tomorrow is another class, another pinup and review, more discussion, more learning and lot more drawing.
Below is our composite City of Plazas, art analysis, vignette sketches and our definition as we move forward.
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