A4006 Urban Design Studio VI
INSTRUCTORS Tschumi, KowalskiCY-PLEX
A new, highly, computerized social facility for future students. A new type of interactive digital complex located amidst McKim, Mead & White s master plan for Columbia.
Columbia University will build a new Student Activity Center. The 200,000 square feet facility is to be located at the corner of Broadway and 115 th Street, overlooking the campus. It is to include a black box theater, a 400-seat cinema that can be combined with an 1100-seat auditorium, dining facilities, meeting rooms, a large bookstore, student clubs, game rooms, a night club, six thousand mailboxes and a major multi-activity social space.
Should it cater to the needs and requests of the student body and the University now, or should it project boldly into the future?
This semester s project intends to put the emphasis on the future (even futuristic) interpretation and re-interpretation of the program. It intends to investigate new modes of social interaction as related to new forms of architectural expression.
- The themes that will be explored this semester are the following:
a. Theorem: Architecture is the meeting of the real and the virtual as much as it is the meeting of spaces and events.
b. Corollary: Architecture is increasingly defined by its material components (its hardware) and by immaterial ones (its software, its information systems).
c. Question: Just as the invention of perspective techniques in the Renaissance transformed architectural thought, will advanced computer modeling techniques inform a new architecture?
d. Question: If architecture is defined as much by its spaces as by the activities that take place in these, is movement the result of the interface between space and activities? Or is movement the generator?