HS 2014/SS 2015 - RESISTANCE, RELEVANCE, RESILIENCE
Something Fantastic is happy to announce that Charlotte Malterre Barthes has joined the core teaching team of MAS Urban Design, directing the course's focus on Cairo, Egypt.
In a global context where architects have been loosing ground to both informal modes of construction and to the speculative real-estate sector, this program conducts a reflection towards a defiant repositioning of our discipline against its eroding leverage.
(1)RESISTANCE: Reacting/ Rebellious/ Urgent/ Insurgent/ Opposing/
Defiant Investigating the role of design in the production of urban space, and the position of designers in market-driven development logics, the underlying mechanisms of brutal urbanization that have led
to untenable situations of spatial and social injustice will be identified.
(2)RELEVANCE: Significant/ Pertinent/ Substantial/ Momentous/ Meaningful/
With the idea to re-radicalize the design field, the program's goal is in a second phase, to generate tactics that should reposition architecture as a relevant and central method to making the city.
(3) RESILIENCE: Rebound/ Robust/ Spirited/ Durable/ Enduring/ Flexible/
Buoyant/ Because the program is addressing the challenges of the profession faced on all fronts by forces of urbanization, resilience is a theme to be explored not as the over worn concept of sustainability but as a framework for an ethical, social, political practice of architecture and urban design.
The program addresses young professionals in the field of architecture and urban design that have a special interest in practicing within informal territories and environments. This year's course focuses on the comparably sophisticated informal building industry of Cairo, its economic mechanisms and challenges. How can a city like Cairo develop and grow despite an extreme scarcity of fertile, well-connected land?