Urban Opera

Our Urban Opera opens for one night only on December 5, 2025 in the Lower Gallery of Meyerson Hall. We are a consortium of schools and students, from both Architecture and Landscape Architecture departments at Weitzman and students from the École Supérieure Nationale d’Architecture Versailles, led by architect and professor Matthias Armengaud with Rachel Rouzaud. At Weitzman, our teaching team comprises Annette Fierro, dramaturg Sebastienne Mundheim, composer Bobby Pietrusko, and Danny Jarabek, designer and eco-activist.

Our ARCH/LARP701 studio begins in the consideration of site, which for the semester will be a length of the river L’Arc in the south of France, one which is distinguished by a vast history, changing conditions of use and climate, and a diverse set of industrial, human, and non-human habitations. Located just outside the city of Aix-en-Provence, this is a “fallow” place, a peri-urban site in a shifting territory, located in a context which is world renowned for its beauty but also deeply problematized by various forms of usage and domestication. Each group of students has chosen one section of the river to thematize dramatically as well as to do an architectural intervention of open-ended habitation.

The most ambitious and unique goal of the studio is to explore a form of expression which challenges conventions of silent and static manifestation of work. In the embrace of the temporal, the studio product will include active narrative, sound, and action. The final product of the semester will be a performance in which the dynamics of site are conceived as object of study, provocateurs of imagination, protagonists of action and intention. Brought together in a live performance incorporating forms of representation developed throughout the semester along with constructed narratives, recordings, and fabricated music, we explore an open interdisciplinary form at full-scale and real time: URBAN OPERA.

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu. Please note, we require at least five (5) business days’ notice.