The Great Khan’s atlas contains also the maps of the promised lands visited in thought but not yet discovered or founded: New Atlantis, Utopia, the City of the Sun, Oceana, Tamoé, New Harmony, New Lanark, Icaria.
Kublai asked Marco: “You, who go about exploring and who see signs, can tell me toward which of these futures the favouring winds are driving us.”
“For these ports I could not draw a route on the map or set a date for the landing. At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of lights in the for, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city toward my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop.” (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Vintage 1997, p.164)
This term, Architectural Design Theory takes you on a journey exploring qualities that
contribute to a better city and a better life. Stories and concepts developed in literature and architectural theory are read, discussed, visualised and applied to your designs and writings, resulting in proposals that might not base itself on principles of built form, but on your critical position on a defining architectural theory of the 20th Century. Scenarios and sequences will tell your scenographical story of a better city in a spatial book, for which Sitte, Howard, Le Corbusier, Wright, Rossi, Venturi, Rowe, Lynch and Koolhaas among others will act as ghost-writers.
The lecture courses Architectural History II, Architectural Theory II and Perception for
Architects II will provide you with the theoretical knowledge necessary for your critical
design development.
ll information is subject to change.