Concept and “The New Type of”: New programs for the 21st Century

The studio embraces the incessant mutability of the city, focusing on its impending needs and asking: what happenings can establish new links, connections to public use, social relations and so on, that can reframe architecture and its cultural relevance? Following this conversation, each student group is assigned a major theoretical framework: political, environmental, social, infrastructural, recreational, or educational. Based on the contemporary challenges that these backgrounds raise, each group proposes and unnamed program in a generic Manhattan block. The six new programs are then weaved by an underground component conjunctively designed by the studio. The studio explores how a program can regulate architecture’s relationship with society and how space can not only contribute to it but also how it can challenge it. The studio thinks about what architecture does, and about the effect.