Dennis Hollingsworth

Arch Crit

This week, I got this email message:

Dennnnnis!!!

Back in LA!

Listen....PLEASE come to the final review of my studio at the Wedge Gallery in the Burbank campus on Friday Dec. 9th, 10AM-1:00PM. It's a design competition for a transportation system for the West Bank and Gaza. It's gonna be good and it would be great to have your feet touch Woodbury Soil again.

(The images above are from the RAND Corporation's study "The Arc -A Formal Structure for a Palestinian State"

That was from Gerard (Gerry) Smulevich, a good friend and fellow teacher(former -I taught architecture studio from '91 to '99, so fun it was).
We had a lot of fun with the architectural studios where one could simultaneously minister the principles of architecture and explore various topics within a short period of time, a university quarter.

It was a blast. (a pun to be intended.)

He and I had once taught a studio where the assignment was a visitor center and museum of the Cold War. The site was a Nevada Nuclear test Site Bomb Crater. It was a studio in the third year where the ideas and ramifications of long span structures are presented. We took the opportunity to span the 20th century too.

The wonderful thing about teaching architecture is that one is really bringing out what the students already know innately: structural ideas, the nature of habitation, how we live in cities. Teaching was like reminding people what they already knew all along. I love that moment when the light bulb goes off in a students eyes.

So, true to form, Gerry has assigned a provocative client and supercharged context for his 4th year urban design studio. While the kids get to wrestle with the aspects of urban design (circulation, use, the nature of community, etc.), they also get to wrap their heads around quantum -extra-spicy geopolitics.

It's going to be a blast (a pun not intended).

(image source: CIA Factbook)

Now, I have a few thoughts prior to going into the fray of the critique tomorrow:

-This project must assume that a precondition to building this physical infrastructure is the building a mental infrastructure in the fledgling Palestinian state. Tribal warlordism has to be vanquished and freedom/democracy has to take root (for example: will Hamas disappear or at least transform into a benign and democratic agency?).

The only alternative to a democratic precondition is a sick-cum-artful fantasy of an atavistic design (urbanism)... fascist architecture, a no-go.

-One cannot design without the capacity of empathy. Therefore, the first question to the students should be: who are the Palestinians? Will the students know their clients enough to describe them? How can I know that they (the students) know?

-What about Israel? What will their position regarding this connection be? What are all the possible positions?

(image Source: CIA Factbook.)

-The scale of the project is so immense. How big is this region? Will the students anticipate and investigate this issue? How does the student avoid the pitfalls of the giant mark on the landscape, the arrogant urban drawing, the conceit of the single design stroke?

Or is the alternative to the arrogant singularity a design-in-evolution like a SimCity? Is the design better a set of principles or goals or even urban schemata such as a Wrightian Broadacre City<>/a> or Ebenezer Howard's Garden City? Is there an appropriate heuristic approach to regional urban planning?

-What about the scale of time? Will the students anticipate trends in transportation technology, will they research futurist predictive efforts? For example, how will we live in cities now that commerce goes online and goods will be moved (shipped to us) rather than people to goods.