This website documents the projects completed by second semester first year graduate students at The University of Texas at San Antonio’s School of Architecture and Planning under the tutelage of Professor Taeg Nishimoto.
The design studio class is ARC6136, Advanced Topics Studio, in which the students spend the entire semester to work on their individual projects for cities around the world, following the structure of the studio.
The rather flexibly characterized theme of the studio was presented to the students as follows:
Building for Urban Entertainment
Urban life, for the people who live in that city as well as for the people who visit, requires spaces and places that serve the desire for interactions in the form of “entertainment.” The culture and the sub-culture of the city is nurtured by what kind of shared experiences are available that are unique to the conditions and situations of the city. The characterizations of “entertainment” are broadly defined, from cultural to physical, from sensual to educational, though the essence of this characterization is based on a dimension of desirability for the shared experiences.
For these characterizations, the most critical component for a building to contribute is its programmatic conceptions related to the situation and people. It requires a degree of imaginative idiosyncrasies to achieve rather unexpected desirability for the building and the place. It is, therefore, not about what makes immediate sense but what makes it interesting to explore.
As one of the critical components of design proposal development, this element of imaginative idiosyncrasy relies on the narrative quality of what is envisioned. It is based on, not entirely made-up situations and ideas, but on the collected information on the city and its people. It is about connecting the dots that are found in the process and stimulating the desirability generated by it. In that sense, it is about creating a fictional discourse, much like literary fictions, in the form of building image and its proposed program.
This semester, you are to go through a process to learn narrative aspects of design development. It involves identifying a viable situation, manipulating and imagining the “what if” aspects of activities, and making a design proposal for a single building with appropriate amount of information to describe the imagined reality.
Each student is encouraged to identify an unique situation, and the location of the proposal can be anywhere in the world. The focused characterization of the proposed program is also up to each student. The entire premise of each project, however, requires thorough and clear set of information that is generated in the process.
Taeg Nishimoto
Professor of Architecture
taeg.nishimoto@utsa.edu