Berlin 2.0 – Spring Break 2015
February 26 – March 8, 2015
Led by Associate Professors Thomas Forget and Emily Makas
The SoA is offering an exciting Spring Break travel opportunity linked to two interconnected Spring 2015 semester courses. Students will enroll in one or both courses as part of their regular semester course load, and travel to Berlin, Germany during Spring Break.
Content
Over the past two centuries, Berlin has served as the capital of a vast succession of political entities – Royal Prussia, Imperial Germany, the democratic Weimar Republic, the totalitarian Nazi Reich, the communist GDR, and the reunited Federal Republic of Germany. Today, as it strives to solidify its post-reunification identity not only as Germany’s center, but also as the unofficial capital of the European Union and as a primary hub within the global economy, Berlin is struggling to grapple with the meaning of its complex history. Debates over its identity as a capital are most tangible in its urban fabric, where the physical traces of its extraordinary, layered history are both legible and subject to constant reinterpretation. The living history of the city is present not only in its governmental buildings, housing, public spaces, and architectural monuments, but also in its street patterns, infrastructural networks, and demographic data. Berlin is an ideal case study of the dialogue between the built environment and the immaterial forces (political, social, cultural, etc.) that shape it, and this program engages its richness for the sake of an in-depth inquiry into the nature of the contemporary urban realm.
For the past century, Berlin has been at the forefront of conversations about multifamily housing, both as an urban typology and in terms of unit design. The city built apartments according to new Modernist paradigms in the 1920s as well as hosted major international housing exhibitions in the 1950s and 1980s in which the most important designers of the twenty-first century participated. In the past two decades, Berlin has been Europe’s largest building site, and architects continue to experiment to meet twenty-first century housing challenges.
Housing and the extent to which place matters in the twenty-first century city are open questions, and this program offers students an opportunity to conduct either design experimentation on the nature of contemporary urban housing and/or scholarly research on spaces of collective meaning. In a rare opportunity for collaboration between design thinking and historical research, students will participate in one or two parallel courses (a design studio and a history seminar) that use Berlin as a site of architectural and urban inquiry. Whereas the studio employs Berlin as a vast resources of experimental housing examples, the seminar examines moments in Berlin that responded – and failed to respond – to its multiple legacies. The program promotes exchanges between students in both courses through collaborative teaching and the overlapping objectives of the two instructors.
Tracks
There are two options for participating in this Spring Break trip:
1. Enroll in the 5-credit Architectural Design Studio: This option is open only to 4thyear Undergrads in Architecture. Students in the studio may elect to also take the history seminar, but are not required to do so. Even if enrolling in both courses, students participating in the studio should apply to the studio option below. The subsidized trip fee for students participating in the funded studio is $525 (regardless of whether also taking the seminar or not).
2. Enroll in only the 3-credit Architectural History seminar: This option is available to any student in the School of Architecture. By permission of instructor, non-School of Architecture students are also welcome to apply. The trip fee for seminar only students is $1025.
Coursework
Seminar – Layered Berlin: Memories
ARCH 4205-W / 5205 – Dr. Emily Makas, 3 credits | T 9:30-12:15
This course will explore the complex intersecting relationships between political history, broader cultural trends, and memory in the city of Berlin. The focus of the course will be on public spaces, public buildings, museums, and memorials of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the first half of the semester, the course will meet once weekly on campus to familiarize students with Berlin’s political, urban, and architectural history through a series of lectures, readings, and movies. Over spring break, students will explore in detail the architectural and planning histories of key sites and spaces in Berlin through walking tours, site visits, and museums. Students will examine how various historical periods and their memories are layered within the contemporary city.
The course will focus on public spaces, buildings, and sites as both components of the city’s history as well as places in which the city’s layered history and memory are explicitly and implicitly present today. Over the course of the semester – including before, during and after the trip – students will combine experiential site studies with secondary source research to prepare case studies of the history, memories, and perceptions of Berlin’s iconic public or memory spaces.
Studio – Urban Potential
ARCH 4102 – Thomas Forget, 5 credits
This studio is an experimental inquiry into the nature of contemporary urban housing, with a specific emphasis on the changing lifestyles of millennials and subsequent generations, young professionals who reached adulthood since the year 2000. As cultural norms and economic opportunities evolve in a globalized society, housing design must respond, and this studio confronts the necessity to evolve existing typologies, in both modest and radical ways. The studio foregrounds precedent research as a primary vehicle of inquiry, and students will interrogate typological paradigms of twentieth century housing, experimental housing projects throughout history, and contemporary housing projects (both built and unbuilt) that have already forwarded ideas regarding the evolution of housing. Students will focus both on the individual living unit and on site planning and building massing, and the studio will explore ways in which the various scales of housing architecture may inform/limit each other during the design process.
The studio is partially funded by a Charlotte-based real estate developer, Northwood Ravin, and students will be exposed to practical and economic aspects of contemporary housing through exchanges with professionals at the firm, which seeks new ideas to steer their evolution as a housing provider in the region. This rare opportunity to exchange ideas between a highly theoretical studio context and a real-world developer will yield a mixture of practical and theoretical lessons, and the studio’s engagement with Northwood Ravin will inform its experiments in ways that would be otherwise inconceivable. The focus of the inquiries will be a local site in the Plaza Midwood section of Charlotte that the developer has already partially developed and plans to develop further, so students will deploy their housing ideas onto a known site and mediate them through an actual context. At the same time, the ultimate goal of the studio is to produce experimental housing designs untethered to real-world concerns, and emphasis will be placed on questions not answers.
The studio begins with a one-month period of precedent and site research. Students conduct both case studies and precedent analyses of a range of housing projects through the construction of analytical drawings and models, with special emphasis on comparisons and contrasts between European and American paradigms. During this research period, students also analyze the site, meet with the developer regarding their aspirations and questions, and conduct brief design charrettes aimed at identifying design questions that will inform the rest of the semester. Students then apply their research toward more comprehensive design experiments at multiple scales on the given site. Students will work in groups, not individually, though individual tasks within group objectives will be common. Over spring break, the studio visits Berlin and its vast resource of housing. Students will be exposed to those resources, more or less, chronologically: late-nineteenth century/early-twentieth century courtyard housing blocks; Modernist housing estates of the 1920s; the 1957 IBA Interbau Housing Exhibition; the IBA Housing Exhibition of the 1980s; post-Berlin Wall housing experiments; plans for the IBA 2020 exhibition; as well as individual examples that do not fall into a clear category. Tours of many of the contemporary examples will be conducted by their designers, who will also open their offices to students for informal discussions on the progress of the student experiments. After spring break, students will develop their design inquiries, leading up to an exhibition and symposium at the end of the semester that present the findings of the studio, including views on the importance of experimentation to practice.
Application
For more information and to apply, please see the OEA web site for the SoA Berlin spring break trip.