Urban Futures: Resiliency
July 15-24, 2020
Online Only
Registration Deadline: July 14, 2020
AAVS Agenda:
Our cities have undergone shifts due to the COVID-19 pandemic that months ago seemed unthinkable. It has demonstrated how quickly social behaviors and patterns of life can change in response to an external factor. It has also offered a unique opportunity to explore the design of future urban systems in new ways.
Designers have always faced challenges planning for the dynamic and rapidly changing aspects of society and its environment; however, this current situation demands an unprecedented need to rethink our everyday lives and experiences. These transformations significantly impact the nature of how we experience our city’s public spaces, its enclosed environments, and the daily commutes to a plethora of activities in its boroughs. As a response, this program will explore the future of cities in a virtual realm through experimentation with augmented reality and the alteration of physical spaces through digital means.
Participants will study the infrastructural typologies and dynamic urban morphologies that make up New York and digitally reconfigure and explore how these spaces can be experienced in the future both physically and digitally. Through computational and visualization techniques to reconfigure the urban environment this program not only glimpses what the city can be but also initiates discourse that can destabilize the dominant thinking and offer future urban solutions to the changing physical and digital landscapes of our metropolises.
Due to restrictions from the pandemic, the AAVS New York will be an
online-only program for the first time. All workshops, lectures, crits, and collaborations will take place through virtual conferencing, maintaining the same level of exposure to tutors and team members as a regular AA Visiting School. After the workshop introduction and foundation lectures, participants will split into clusters, exposing them to the associative logic and algorithmic approaches of computational design and exploring the representational and interactive possibilities of augmented reality. These foundation tooling sessions will be taught at a basic level to ensure all participants have a solid basis to build from to help drive their projects. Each group of students will produce a proposal to showcase their visions of future urban systems that innovatively respond to technological, environmental, and urban changes happening today.
Registration and more information:
https://www.aaschool.ac.uk/academicprogrammes/visitingschool/newyork
