Advanced Studio V: Fall 1997 Instructor: Thomas Leeser the architecture of navigation II: city without qualities This is the second studio in a series of studios titled The Architecture of Navigation. The previous studio, called Incomplete Awakening, focused on the proposition of digital navigation as an inhabitable public space. The final site for this project was a 360 degree "space simulator" installed in Wood Auditorium. T he common topic of investigation for both studios is the generic quality of contemporary public space. The city without qualities studio will emphasize and focus on public space "informed by the banal as well as the accidental, the trashy, the synthetic, the mechanic, boredom, lack, the tacky as well as the useless", it will focus on the generic as well as, what the Japanese call 'gomi'. We easily forget that most of us live in an environment void of specificity, an environment identifiable at best by superficial differences (often not even names provide a distinction), an environment of a vast sameness. Architects and architecture play an insignificant role in the majority of our contemporary landscape (94% of all structures are designed and built without architects). The studio will initially research the question of the modus operandus of increasing sameness, the everyday practices of the so-called public landscape. The studio will initially catalog the imagery of this landscape, be it of physical or digital nature, and subsequently analyze and reconstitute this material in the attempt to generate a transformed "hyper-generic" landscape: the City without Qualities . Again, as in the previous studio, the ultimate site for this project will be a multi-media set-up within the studio/classroom. A resistance to the traditional representational strategy of drawings, models, walk-through etc. requires a rethinking of the role of representation. This multimedia studio utilizes the technologies available to it as tools for the production of architecture. It understands them as the very site of architecture. Computer programs like Photoshop, Form-Z or Soft-Image take on the role of the site for this hypergeneric environment. Eliminating the archetypal nature of traditional design projects, it frees itself from being bound by the conventions of architectural representation.