The Death of Urbanism - Transitions through five stages of grief
Koolhaas pronounced urbanism dead in 1995. Since then, urban design has struggled to come to terms with this and other losses including environmental stability, affordable housing, design control, and urban amenity. This book explores urban design paradigms transitioning through a misappropriation of Kübler-Ross’ “five stages of grief” – from pro-sprawl ‘denial’, NIMBY ‘anger’, revisionist new urbanist ‘bargaining’, ‘depressed’ starchitects, through to an optimistic manifesto of ‘acceptance’.
In the easternmost district of the Axarquía region of Málaga province there is Frigiliana, a white village of 4,000 people. 300 metres above sea level and benefitting from a subtropical microclimate, looms Frigiliana’s much awarded and praised historic quarter, named “Barribarto”. Here its narrow, steep and winding streets, passageways and alleys combine to form a distinctive framework of small houses, piled one upon another.
SAC Journal 5 - Zero Piranesi / Städelschule Architecture Class
Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s engravings, Campo Marzio dell’antica Roma of 1762, have a peculiar position within the discipline of architecture. With their dissemination, the folio collection of six etchings have till this day nurtured architects’ speculations on the city. Since the Enlightenment, they – and in particular the Campo Marzio plan – have fuelled research, discussions and visions for the future of architecture. These engravings are also some of the most beautiful documents in Western architectural history.
Dirty theory follows the dirt of material and conceptual relations from the midst of complex milieus. It messes with mixed disciplines, showing up in ethnography, in geography, in philosophy, and discovering a suitable habitat in architecture, design and the creative arts. Dirty theory disrupts a comfortable status quo, includ- ing our everyday modes of inhabitation and our habits of thinking. This small book argues that we must work with the dirt to develop an ethics of care and mainte- nance for our precarious environment-worlds.
