Basics

Intro

Teaser: Basics

Theoretical-conceptual basics

Modes of Play

Coming into Play

Motive

Mobilising the brief

Lists

Processing Contingency

Coming into Play

Moving Fences

Play?

State of the art in research

How to Play

Preliminary Practice

Refining the Question

Intervene

Play

Doing

Baseline Survey

Organizing Agencies

Mini Golf

Reflecting

Importing Knowledge

Reflecting

Project Management

Recording

Making Videos

Notations

Displaying

Research Wall

Closing Ceremony

Understanding the Play

Moving beyond the question

Propositions in archives

A matter of re-assembling

Reflective Review: Begegnen

Project Closure

Repository

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Category: conception (15×) description (8×) manual (4×) reference (5×) synthesis (3×)

Contributors: Alexander Römer (2×) Andreas Meichner (1×) Anna Richter (3×) Anna-Sophie Seum (4×) Annika Bauer (3×) Atena Mahjoub (1×) Bernd Kniess (5×) Christopher Dell (4×) Diana Schäffer (4×) Dominique Peck (19×) Flora Fessler (2×) Franziska Dehm (1×) Johannes Schöckle (4×) Juliane Bötel (3×) Kirsten Plöhn (2×) Lena Enne (5×) Maja Momic (1×) Mareike Oberheim (4×) Marian Rudhart (3×) Marie Therese Jakoubek (1×) Marius Töpfer (1×) Milena Stoldt (1×) Negin Jahangiri (4×) Nina Manz (1×) Olena Pudova (3×) Pascal Scheffer (1×) Rebecca Wall (2×) Ronja Scholz (4×) Tomma Groth (1×) Yohanna Bund (1×)

Keywords: "Projects" (5×) action (1×) Communication (1×) Design (3×) Dokumentation (7×) Expertinnen des Alltags (1×) matters of form (3×) medium (4×) Minimal Structure (1×) notation (3×) planning (2×) problematisation (1×) Rothenburgsort (1×) stadtteilöffentlich (1×) Uncertainty (1×)

Dominique Peck has joined the Research and Teaching Programme Urban Design’s academic staff at HafenCity University in 2015. Being a UD alumni, his work has a focus on project management, design development and transposing formats in research, teaching and practice. Dominique was co-project managing the live project Building a Proposition for Future Activities and is now focused on his PhD Project Re-positioning Project Management in Urban Design.

Bernd Kniess is an architect and urban planner. Since 2008 he is Professor for Urban Design at HafenCity Universität Hamburg where he established the Master Programme Urban Design. He is interested in the negotiation of the contemporary city, whose planning principles he aims to diagrammatically describe and transfer into a relational practice as procedure.

Public space is where public life unfolds!

Stadtteilbeirat Rothenburgsort

Issues

The evening before

Exposé

Unbuilding

The Community of Deconstruction

From disciplines to disciplining

Learning from Las Vegas

Open Form

Facilitate Uncertainty

Rules of Play

Workshop: Infrastructure

Cooperative Review Process

Project Days

Planänderung

Mediators

Conception

Interviews

Coproduction

Reflective Review

Performance

Talking Billebogen Atlas

Talking Stadteingang Elbbrücken

21. Situationen Rothenburgsort

Annäherungen an was?

Tod dem Projekt! Lang lebe der systemische Wandel

New Commons for Europe

Allesandersplatz

Die Stadt als offene Partitur

Give me a gun and I will make all buildings move

Play

Building a Proposition for Future Activities

Transposition 1: Project vs. Project Days

Transposition 2: Project Days vs. Planning Competition

Transposition 3: Planning Competition vs. Jury

Transposition 7: Completion of service phase 2 vs. Project Execution

Column A

The project Learning from Las Vegas is interesting for project management in urban design in the sense that its protagonists have done away with contemporary methods, tools, theories and discourses, including aesthetics, to make aspects of what it means to live today the central object of architectural production again. In the middle column of this page we gather only a few aspects of how this came about. With the death of Robert Venturi and the belated honor for Denise Scott Brown's contribution to Venturi's work, which won numerous prizes and positions, numerous exhibitions and publications on the life's work of the two have been compiled. The videos in this column originate from a conference at the AA in London and impressively show how and why Venturi and Scott-Brown's projects continue to be an integral part of the teaching, research and practice of so many architectural and urban planning practices. In a sense, with the Learning from format they have anticipated aspects of what is now celebrated as a real laboratory: the co-production of public, private and civil society actors in the realization of projects understood as knowledge production processes.

AA School of Architecture. 2009. Denise Scott Brown - Learning from Bob and Denise - Part 1. Accessed January 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU3zUzHog3E&list=PLI1nDzeohfnkvoJ7Ibxkcg-da5pO2Zp-9.

AA School of Architecture. 2009. Denise Scott Brown - Learning from Bob and Denise - Part 2. Accessed January 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AM-I8RFExNA&t=0s&index=3&list=PLI1nDzeohfnkvoJ7Ibxkcg-da5pO2Zp-9.

AA School of Architecture. 2009. Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi - Presentations and Discussion - Part 1. Accessed January 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ny4tgWwiLQ&list=PLI1nDzeohfnkvoJ7Ibxkcg-da5pO2Zp-9&index=3.

AA School of Architecture. 2009. Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi - Presentations and Discussion - Part 2. Accessed January 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey_aVl7ZeAM&index=4&list=PLI1nDzeohfnkvoJ7Ibxkcg-da5pO2Zp-9.

About column A

The perspectivation of the urban “as is” has a prominent history in architectural education. About half a century ago, following Louis Wirth’s notion of “urbanism as a way of life” (Wirth 1938), two architects worked against architecture’s purity as a discipline. In a recent interview with Denise Scott-Brown (2016), she recalled that “Bob Venturi was the only member of the architecture faculty [at Penn] who sympathized with my attempts to straddle architecture and planning responsibly and also imaginatively.” Scott-Brown joined Penn in 1960 and together with Venturi was hired to relate theory to design. “From that time, we worked together—first as teachers, communicating ideas and subject matter, tying coursework to studio, architecture to planning, and the subject matter that interested [us], to the students' work and ours as designers. In 1964 I ran the work topics, seminars and term papers for both courses. Bob's lectures introduced new ways for architects to approach history as designers and formed the basis for Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.” There they argued to stop Mies van der Rohe-like modernism from becoming the building industry’s wet dream – pure construction. Both built their arguments on Kevin Lynch 1960s work The Image of the City, which tried to operationalise the coproduction of meaning of places realised on the basis of doing field research and mapping its results.

Scott-Brown and Venturi used these methods in combination with others in their seminal project Learning from Las Vegas. The project started as a manifesto-like piece in Architectural Forum in March 1968 conceived and written by Denise Scott-Brown and Robert Venturi entitled “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas”. They wanted to do away with projects indebted to heroic and monumental modernism, transpose an existing urban situation into the academic realm of architectural production and re-negotiate education from there. In the piece "Mourning the Suburbs: Learning from Levittown", Beatrice Colomina tells the reader about the ‘density of urban unrest and challenges to normative architectural education’ during Scott-Brown and Venturi’s tenure at the School of Architecture at Yale University (Colomina 2011). "Yale provided a focal point for demonstrators who were angry about the ongoing Vietnam War and about societal institutions that were slow to act on matters of racial and gender inequality (Shelton 2015)." Scott-Brown and Venturi transposed their thinking into writing and then into a prototype teaching project. The team taught and co-developed with their students from architecture and graphic design new approaches in an integrative, hands-on and explorative way. The final spreads in the first published edition represent Venturi and Scott-Brown’s efforts to be inclusive to alternative perspectives with the aim not only to process the relations between observers and their aesthetics, but also to convey an understanding of the city as a “set of acitivities” (Venturi and Scott Brown 1977, 76). Later the project was made public in the form of an exhibition and Scott-Brown and Izenour together with the student Virginia Carroll scripted a plan for another studio titled “Learning from Levittown”. However, the criticism within the School of Architecture about the approach and resources used in its operationalisation eventually drove Venturi to give up teaching at all.

In the end, what seems relevant to today's efforts to co-produce urban forms of knowledge when visiting Learning from Las Vegas again is the request to the architect to sharpen the view of the existing world in its actual and not in its imaginary complexity.

Metadata

Issue date: 01/03/2019
Entry date: 10/06/2020
Contributors: Dominique Peck Anna Richter
Keywords: Design

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Basics

Intro

Modes of Play

Coming into Play

Play?

How to Play

Play

Doing

Reflecting

Recording

Displaying

Understanding the Play

Project Closure

Repository

Sort by:

Filter by: All (36)––

Play

Building a Proposition for Future Activities

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