Addendum to Syllabus

May 26
Addendum to Syllabus
Roto sum studio 2011
Hybrid of Extremes

field work
yesterday we did a walking tour in the LA downtown core, with a Brady Westwater.

he is a curator more than a real estate broker. Unusual but true.
his longtime interest has been to bring real life back into the city which makes it possible for people to live and work in the center. their are no franchise stores being brought in, only or mostly local people who are artisans working small scale with large scale influence
all of the new businesses are in the category of culture creation. fashion, food, furniture, art, performance, theater, media creation, and a privately owned big bookstore with 'live literature' spoken, sung, and performed.
sci-arc is now there and cal arts, and a few other design schools are moving into the area with a longterm vision of making downtown a design/art version of silicon valley.

almost all of these are cross programmed - imagine this analogy  - a city envisioned like a rainforest with all of the plants intertwined and feeding each other versus a city zoned like a botanical garden.

the city
Los Angeles is at the crossroads. City growth has been focused on economic gains with little thought given to social vitality. Now there is a new strategy.   I believe the next phase of growth in every city that remains vital as it becomes more complex will be to go the direction of LA's core. the current generation (your’s) are inventing their lives and life practices not merely looking for a job along with leisure and entertainment.  The city is the new incubator, a beehive active almost 24 hours a day. social and financial modeling will have equal standing in the new great cities. this has parallels in history - at the turn of the 19th to 20thc -  great cities of western and eastern europe paris, berlin, Barcelona, Lisbon, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, etc lived througha period called the “banquet Years” or Fin de Siecle.
Now in the 21stc. it is our turn to take the baton and move it along, in our own way but according to the memories embedded in Urban Societies.

Assignments  research

Reading and interpreting the world, converting the worlds’ conceptual structures. making maps
to record the answers to:
“what did we-you see and learn, when we were in the downtown core 2 days ago?”
Map our afternoon, to record where we were (district), what we did, and what we learned.
Map the path and the places, the space and the activities, the experience and the memories,
the learning and the teaching, and TIME systems.


concepts :
movement and  rest.
rainforest as a metaphor for a city’s social/cultural infrastructures networks
               
            1. map your experience
            2. list all the places we stopped and the
3. describe los angeles through the lens of your city in every way you can,
    referring to calvinos’  “invisible cities”
            4. list all of the activities and the programs, qualities ( and quantities (how many how much)
           
Ways of Seeing and Knowing.

5. record what you see with images in 2 categories  1. nature  2. human-made
            talk about what they are and why those?


team 1. Research on history, evolutionary trajectories and patterns of downtown.
team 2. Massing / test fits on open land on main at 6th. St.
team 3. Model of district.  -  physical and digital.
team 4. Write social programs for city district and buildings

                       
research  : 
on going, starting with case studies on public spaces small and big. Campos, piazza, squares, alleys, boardwalks, and roof tops, etc