New Choreographies for the Laboratorized City

This MArch course was conceived as a visual and analytic chronicle of 2020 and the new alliance of Architecture, Science and Society that unfolded due to the global pandemic and transmogrified cities across the world. It invited the students to critically reflect on the unprecedented laboratorization of urban space and the radical modification of the traditional spatial conventions of urban life. The students gained methodological skills that enabled them to trace and scrutinize the following three transformations in pandemic cities: 1. how the virus has transformed different architectural typologies and urban space; 2. how the pandemic has changed (and continues to change) the spatial choreography of daily life; 3) how urban citizens have become subjects and participants in experimentations. The students studied a typology of their choice (i.e. libraries, supermarkets, streets, museums, restaurants, domestic spaces, markets, public squares, parks, etc.) from November 2020 to January 2021 and produced an Ethnographic-Sketch-Folio based on secondary ethnographic materials (images, texts, archival materials, news reports) and socially distant ethnographic observations. The Sketch Folio contains raw materials from observations: notes, sketches and diagrams, as well us interviews and polls. Like the design portfolio, it shows the approach, process, observations, arguments and results, but unlike the design portfolios, it does not have to be super sophisticated, just analytical and smart.

The students gained:

1. knowledge on different typologies and the specific ways that the pandemic has affected architecture and cities
2. knowledge on ethnography as a methodology and the method of sequential photography of Steward Brand
3. descriptive skills: the students traced sequential changes in one typology, scrutinized normal versus pandemic formats of functioning of the typology; analysed how a buildings/material arrangements facilitate specific actions and configure types of relations between people; traced people’s behaviours; focused on specific experiences related to the new Covid-19 restrictions and how they shaped urban space; collected new pictograms and reflected on the new signposting system; traced patterns of new spatial practices of users; analysed new technologies and the use of new materials related to the pandemic; reflected on the new forms of power distribution and the new forms of social connectivity/social distancing; analysed various forms of hybridization of typologies.
4. analytical skills: the students analysed critically the changes in specific typologies and the transformations of urban life and connected their findings with the literature. They also speculated on the future: How is the pandemic city preparing us for post-Covid urban life? What kind of technologies, politics, forms of governmentality and sociality will flourish in a post-Covid era? What will be the role of the architect in this new social and political climate? The students created their own post-Covid pictograms.