Urban Eco Acupuncture Studio (ABPL90111)

Students will take part in an international studio in the Dutch city of Leeuwarden, in collaboration with students and academics from the Technical University of Delft and the Alto Design Factory in Leeuwarden. This studio will address the strategic objectives laid out by the City of Leeuwarden for the development of a resilient and socially innovative city. We will focus on 3-4 urban sites. The sites have been selected by the city as key sites for experimenting with ideas about new urban infrastructure and new spatial typologies and systems to support the city and its population in the face of economic and climatic change. The design projects include: Urban interventions for public life and smarter urban parks; Experimental distributed manufacturing precincts; Distributed systems of provision focused on resilient energy technologies; New models of high density mixed living.

The studio aims to bring together students from Architecture, Urban Design, and Landscape Architecture streams and encourage an interdisciplinary focus. Pre-trip briefings or seminars will precede the travel component of the studio. The studio will incur travel costs, in addition to tuition fees.

This studio will introduce students to the unique and powerful design culture currently operating in the Netherlands. This Dutch design thinking is uniquely suited to addressing complex environmental and urban problems. The students will work directly with Dutch designers and clients and will work through design responses and solutions as their learning journey. We have discovered that it is by being immersed within a design challenge context that the students fully appreciate the subtle complexity of those challenges and the required responses. This travelling design studio will take in the disciplinary expertise of architectural, industrial and interior design within a frame work of architectural, landscape and urban design strategies.

Students will develop design interventions to transform the existing built environment and systems of provision (energy, water, food, transport, information) for a sustainable, low carbon, resilient future. What steps must be taken today to get there? The aim is to identify opportunities that can become sites of design intervention to shift the path of innovation on a new trajectory: towards sustainable, resilient conditions. We will also explore Rotterdam, one of the world’s pre-eminent architectural and design laboratories.

APPROXIMATE COSTS

Travel: $3,000
Accommodation: Students are to be located in shared accommodation $1,050 (approx.)
Living expenses (meals and incidentals): $650