Urban Design Studio

The Urban Design curriculum exploits the pedagogic potential of the studio as a form of design-based critical inquiry. Studio projects focus on topics related to contemporary Urban Design practice. All three studios emphasize a multiscalar – local, neighborhood, metropolitan, regional, global – approach to the urban site, and view Urban Design as an interdisciplinary practice that negotiates between diverse actors in the urban dynamic. By proposing an expanded architecturally-based teaching model for Urban Design, the program advocates working from the “ground up” rather than adopting a “top down” master-planning approach. It takes advantage of architecture’s traditional concerns for site specificity, spatial experience, construction logics, economics of organization, morphology, and physical form, while also engaging knowledge associated with disciplines such as urban ecology, urban geography, and landscape design. In this sense, the program is considered experimental, exploratory, and unorthodox relative to the established canons of the traditional architectural design studio.

More about the Urban Design Program at GSAPP