Workshop RADICAL(c)ITIES para diseñar 1 kilómetro cuadrado en Dubai

Del 6 al 31 de Marzo, Miguel Luengo Angulo (Profesor Adjunto de Teoría e Historia de la Arquitectura en la Universidad Europea de Madrid/UEM) dirigirá un workshop en el que alumnos de la Escuela de Arquitectura de Alicante, la UEM, y la American University in Dubai diseñarán por equipos 1 kilómetro cuadrado en Dubai.

Resumen en inglés del curso:

“Forced to lie still and equal to herself to be best remembered, Zora has languished, fell apart and disappeared. The earth has forgotten her “. Italo Calvino. Invisible Cities.

 

Dubai is an extraordinary, radical, fascinating metropolis that is already adapting to the changing conditions and qualities in the design and production of urban or architectural environments. Its rulers consciously foresee and encourage new ways of transforming the existing realm into something creative and new.

 

This course is a hybrid between theory, history, urban planning, sociology and architectural design rendered as a workshop. It wants to recreate an urban fiction that is almost real by commissioning the students to select, imagine, elaborate and design a 1sqKm area of existing Dubai city that will necessarily acknowledge every single aspect of contemporary’s urban and social planning: economics, sustainability, history, infrastructures, tradition, symbolism, ethics, adaptability, design and landscape will be naturally addressed and considered with the support of different disciplines and methods by experts from the various areas (urban planners, architects…).

One of the issues that professionals now face is that we cannot test, no more since the fall of International Style, big scale ideals without taking into account the truly driving forces of our contemporary society, with a very dominant role assigned to developers and municipalities. So even if they are still our main providers of sites and functions to fill in, we may now need to find a bigger range of transformation. Absorbing and processing the existing – past and present- Dubai is our first duty.

Another main aspect of this course is to expand the meaning of a design degree by involving paradoxical resources that are traditionally non-architectural, we involve society and society must involve us. Even if the reasons below design might be economic we need to reconsider our design processes in order to elaborate more contemporary tools, towards processing design. Through the designed city that Dubai encompasses to the desired city that reality supplies via culture, identity, natural resources among other inner strengths.

The third step in this ladder is a not-that-traditional design workshop where every group of students will develop a portion of Dubai of their choice for a 1sqKm case study. This Future Dubai will include theoretical lectures to inform and shape the final product of this course.

In the future, a resilient city demands architects with extended goals and competences, not only more responsible of what they do but also aware of the maintenance and adaptability of the users needs; seeking to elaborate a solid, encouraging and plural architectural discourse.