Urban interior

Nathalie Rozencwajg, Michel da Costa Gonçalves

At the end there is one in many. Tackling the insoluble challenge of urban evolution, the unit will investigate accidents and controls as an intervention posture for dense cities. Reinvesting the large scale with individual perception, we will propose designs through voids, layering contemporary performative and parametric paradigms with an invested consideration for cultural readings and phenomenological experience.

Rather then defining precise form, which contradicts the unpredictability of urban living and its intrinsically iterative development, our questioning of metropolitan growth will be mediated by investigations into defined interiorities. Merging compelling and iconic urban settings with research into equally illustrious typologies, we will seek to parametrcise the possible and envisage chance in order to create new urban pieces designed from within.

Mundane but historically and formally charged, the room will be the building block that condenses and locates the urban realm. A space where accident and coherence can be articulated at various scales, it exemplifies the common and the intimate. Through a specific usage of advanced modelling tools, we will seek to reintroduce into this complex unit an encompassing design approach, where multi-scale architectonics are considered as imbricate physical and semiotic catalysts.

As we investigate architectural objects in light of contextual qualities, curious notions such as proportion, scale, spatial reading and formal abstraction will be methodologically questioned to reveal intangible physicality and phenomenal specificities. To develop our specific representational techniques and notation systems, we will be looking at the urban stratification both historically and prospectively, picking out its transient qualities through methodical generative techniques. The unit will continue its exploration into layered systematic design processes with the aim of envisaging complexity and details within recursive urban interventions by means of successive inversions of scale, reading the city as architecture, the urban as interior.

Our travels will lead us on a grand tour of urban rooms where incongruities of geopolitics have matured into unique built environments. Having learned from our multi-scale journey, through state to square to room, individual design proposals will embed an equal urge for spatial augmentation and iconic creation.

Unit Staff

Nathalie Rozencwajg studied and has been teaching at the AA since 2004 as well as being the coordinator of the AA Visiting Workshop in Singapore. She is cofounder of RARE architects, based in Paris and London. The office emphasises work at different scales integrating research, design and experiment. The office was awarded the RIBA 2011 award and RCIS Project of the Year Award for Town Hall Hotel in London and is working on large-scale projects exploring advanced fabrication methods notably in the Arctic Circle. www.r-are.net

Michel da Costa Gonçalves studied in Spain and France, and later graduated from the AA Emergent Technologies & Design programme. Cofounder of RARE architects, he is a former project architect for Shigeru Ban, notably on the new Pompidou museum in Metz, and AS in Paris, working on various prestigious international projects. Director and author of ‘City’ series for Autrement publishers and contributor to The Art of Artificial Evolution/Springer Natural Computing Series, he has previously taught at the ENSAPL and has been coordinator of the AA Singapore Workshop since 2006.