Superstudio engages the Daniels Faculty's architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design students in the processes of urbanization that each discipline shares, and introduces the circumstances under which urban projects are pursued as professional activities. The multidisciplinary studio is an opportunity for our mix of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design students to discover shared concerns, approaches and design solutions — and to model the kinds of collaborative, creative and technical processes required to successfully address the complex demands of urban projects today and into the future. Second-year graduate students in architecture and landscape, and advanced, incoming urban design students, work on the same set of assignments throughout the semester. Superstudio requires students to follow a highly staged process and use specific types of 2-D and 3-D drawings, diagrams and models — all pursued in sequence, and in rapid succession. Working at the urban scale requires approximations, and involves planning, strategic thinking, and design complexities that can never be modeled all at once, or through one form of representation. Thus, Superstudio exercises require shifts in scale, and the cross-referencing of drawings, maps, data and information that are critical to this kind of urban-scale work.

Students are introduced to an increasing array of physical planning, design, and sociopolitical complexities as the semester proceeds. Questions about how we chose to organize urban life, and related issues of density, environmental resources, land-use and formal organization are clearly elaborated on from the beginning of the course to the end. This year’s focus on new urban challenges, “involving issues of equity, ecology and global economic processes”, meant that landscape architecture played a critical role in the studio’s pedagogy.

Coordinators:
Richard Sommer, Mauricio Quirós Pacheco, Michael Piper, and Fadi Masoud.

Featured work by:
Josh Bauman, James Bird, Alexia Harvey, Louisa Kennett, Lina Kostoff, Wesley Kwong, Misca Lagassé, Hamed Nadi, Saaraa Premji, Connor Stevens, Bingqing Sun, Ruiqi Zhao