Titie Papadopoulou, Stavros Vergopoulos, Marianthi Liapi Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, School of Architecture, Greece 415
understand them. It isn’t computers so much as the fact that cities like London today
have become vast information territories which record our movements, capture our
pictures, display information and so on. They do things that they just didn’t use to
do as much. I think that’s just a reality. Whether that changes our understanding
of the city or not, I am not sure, but what definitely changes is the reality of what
cities are."
The research project "Urban Strategies and the Resistances of Euclidean Space"
took place at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki within the framework of the
Pythagoras II program of the Greek Ministry of Education that was funded by the
European Union with the objective to support academic research groups. The project
involved the mapping of the 2005-2006 agendas of selected design courses in Schools
of Architecture and Urban Design, located mainly in Europe and the US. The main
focus was placed upon studios that touched upon the issue of using computational
media in urban interventions. The project’s intention was to research those stages
of the design process within the selected design courses for which seldom if ever
one can find published material.
The first deliverable of the project was a catalogue of the selected design
courses, compiling processed information (on course description, instructors and
so on) that was initially found published in the academic programs of the respec-
tive Schools. As a next step, the project scheduled and carried out interviews
with Professors of Architecture mainly from European Schools who accepted the
invitation. In reference to the catalogue, for every design course presented in it,
the following categories appear regarding the analysis of the course’s description:
understanding of the urban space, design theory, design process, design tools and
techniques. The catalogue is open and as such it facilitates communication with
the courses’ instructors, opening up the way towards monitoring the advancements
in special research topics.
The majority of the instructors responsible for the design courses that participate
in the catalogue seem to agree, without this being perceived as a kind of polemic
statement, that architecture is no longer referred to a static aesthetic object. Many
of the recorded design courses employ digital design tools –which are presently
part of the standard equipment in most universities and architectural offices as
well- in order to process objects, investing that way in the autonomy of architec-
ture. Greg Lynn, who currently runs courses at UCLA, Yale and the University of
Applied Arts in Vienna, in his interview to the project made the following state-
ment when asked about his studios: "I won’t give students the context and say
figure out what to do...I always say, let’s figure what we are going to do and then
approach the context with sensitivity." On the use of computational media in the
studio, Lynn commented: "Τhe digital tool’s ability to design with surfaces that have
volume within them is one of the ways we use the tool. So we would teach students
how to do modeling. Anyway, that was the architectural starting point and then we
would go to the context."