The Urban Body is the blur of movement captured on a time-lapse camera. It is the reverse of the static materiality of buildings, asphalt, street furniture, trees etcetera that our discipline prioritizes. But it is itself material. It is not the substance of society, but it is the substance of the social city. It is traffic in all its modes and speeds, but also the human social presence and its visibility that we encounter in urban space, and in itself it generates and supports social forms that we recognize as both social and urban.
The Urban Body studio takes on this mobile human and informational fabric – this ecology of signs and presence – as the problem for research and design, and tries to understand how the urban is implicated in enabling, supporting and identifying the social, cultural and economic lives of people. The studio is particularly interested in the ways this ecology is implicated in the social and economic tactics of livelihood and survival of multifarious people and communities, inhabiting both virtual and physical spaces, and encountering and transacting with each other. We make no distinction between Architecture and Urbanism, seeing the buildings of the city as well as its streets and boulevards and highways and train-lines, communications networks and media, as the open medium for a mobile and performed and transactive sociality.
A transdisciplinary research and design studio entitled the Urban Body has been set up for the 2007 spring semester. The studio brings together Spacelab from Urbanism, Border Conditions and Hyperbody from Architecture, from Free Form (BLOB) from Building Technology, with additional contributions from the Architectural Theory chair, Technical Design & Informatics (TO&I) and the Media Lab. The studio sets out to address urban and architectural praxis in an increasingly mobile and connected and complex world. It proposes the development of tools, incorporating self-organisational principles central to dynamical complex systems. It attempts to transcend the borders between our disciplines and brings an idea of trans-disciplinarity to our spatial and design thinking and generates a whole new teaching praxis within our faculty.
