The third core design studio focuses on current environmental and social issues in the regional urban landscape, with an emphasis on areas significantly impacted by human activities. The studio explores issues of environmental justice and equity, industries and labor, green gentrification, pollution and remediation, novel ecosystems, climate adaptation, and coastal advance/retreat. Students conduct field visits, develop critical site analyses, and propose spatialized design propositions. Research, representation, and design projections will engage with multiple scales of action: from the miniature to the panoramic, from the botanical to the regional. Students in Studio III will develop methodologies for understanding and communicating the complexities of a multi-scalar site, while working iteratively on design strategies for spatializing projected design futures. The studio emphasizes systemic thinking at the regional scale—revealing and understanding systems and their overlaps as interacting and entangled—and students will explore iterative and projective methodologies leading to spatial propositions across a gradient of multiple, nested scales. Students will record, describe, deconstruct, reveal, and reimagine selected systems and their overlaps. Through a research-informed design process, students develop methodologies for selecting a territory and working iteratively on design strategies for spatializing projected futures.
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