Direct Urbanism: Fixed or Flexible?

Carlos Villanueva Brandt

Diploma 10 will concentrate and learn from the ‘live’ city, the real city – the direct city. We will look beyond the predictability of the planned city towards the unpredictability of the experienced city. As we experience the city, we mediate physical and social structures that include ever-changing combinations of fixed and flexible variables. The city’s reality is not made up of physical structures with fixed reference points, but is a complex reality that is constantly articulated and activated by the live realm. Without the live realm and without situations, there is no city. The variables that govern situations and those that generate physical structures are undoubtedly different and we will question, challenge and build on this difference in order to devise salient ways to act within this complexity.

– Can fixed variables influence situations?
– Are flexible variables embedded in situations?

Using fixed and flexible variables, we will experiment with space, we will attempt to spatialise the direct.

The city itself – in this case London or Tokyo – can be interpreted as a catalyst, we will engage with it, immerse ourselves in it, and identify, define and subsequently invent the variables that influence its physical, social, political and economic contexts. We will work with direct action, video, physical models, computer models, working drawings, text and animations in order to experiment with and propose, at the architectural and urban scales, composite spatial interventions that have a direct effect on the reality of the urban condition.

In recent work, we have used masterplans and infrastructures to anchor our interventions – this year, you will have to generate your own catalyst for change. We will use the urban themes of conflict, control, exchange, fiction, groups, life, power, space, structures and time – identified in the London +10 book – to reveal new potentials for urban change. We will question the role that these themes play in the making of architectural space and speculate on their direct relevance to the ‘live’ city. Taking the theme of conflict as an example, can we work with conflict and can conflict be a spatial variable? If conflict is a variable, is it fixed or is it flexible?

Unit Staff

Carlos Villanueva Brandt has been Diploma 10 Unit Master since 1986 and was awarded the RIBA President’s Silver Medal Tutor Prize 2000. The varied work of Carlos Villanueva Brandt Architecture, formed in 1984, has been published widely and exhibited internationally.