The Studio: Operative Urban Practice from Research to Speculation

Abstract

The paper addresses the extra-disciplinarity of cultural-environmental research and design speculation as an area ripe for the critical engagement of globalized architectural education and practice. Students from different disciplines (architecture, planning, urban design, anthropology, engineering, and art) studied ongoing urban and spatial transformations occurring as climactic, socio-political, and economic pressures collide in Northern mega-regions. They focused on understanding architecture and its interdependencies on resources and agencies/institutions within the larger territorial patterns of globalization. Investigations of the spatial, infrastructural, and typological systems emerging from a broad array of interrelated forces--e.g., global finance, industry and trade; digital media/technologies; social discourses; environmental/geophysical phenomena; geo-political strategies-- prioritize crises and controversies bearing critically on the role of ethical design. The works demonstrate a more general shift in architectural thinking, one that points to the emergence of what may be articulated as a new operative practice that reengages Manfredo Tafuri's original concept of operative criticism through the engagement of architecture with the contradictions of its capitalist mode of production today.