Hernan Diaz Alonso introduces the event as a new format of review for each of the four post-grad programs. Rather than focus on individual works, the goal is to address the full complexity of the issues.
David Ruy describes the format, in which Design of Cities instructor Peter Trummer will present the problem and issues, and describe students’ projects. This will be followed by a panel discussion
Peter Trummer describes the 2016-7 Design of Cities program as an investigation into what cities might be in the age of the hyper-object. He argues that cities are already developing forms in response to non-human needs—not only finance, but robots, environmental and other phenomena.
Trummer characterizes their method as a departure from three historical approaches to the city. The Empiricism of Ildefons Cerdà orchestrated infrastructure, and approached functions and citizens as statistical phenomena. The Essentialism of Aldo Rossi (and Oswald Mathias Ungers) argued that cities had already created artifacts (typologies) that embodied the essence of a place, and which could be abstracted into new forms. The Surrealism of Rem Koolhaas also appropriated already existing artifacts, but with the goal of creating something unprecedented. Trummer describes their approach as Realism, in which cities were examined for already-existing new models of urbanism.
Based on this research, each of the five students created a design of a different proposition about the city:
• The Machinic City (Yen-Ting Lin)
• The Mountain City (Siva Sepehry Nejad)
• The Fake City (Yagmur Kaptan)
• The Desert City (Marco Tadros)
• The Biomorphic City (Adrianne Ott)
After Trummer’s presentation, the panel (Hernan Diaz Alonso, David Ruy, Peter Trummer, John Enright, Erik Ghenoiu, Eric Owen Moss, Matthew Soules, Marrikka Trotter) responds with a discussion of post-humanism vs post-humanist, goals, finance capital, and the role of design.
