Post-urban Architectures. Scenarios for the Future of the City
Open PEI Lecture Programme
At present the city reveals, with increasing clarity, how a diffuse and complex whole acquires its real dimension from the territory of encounter and exchange between the general trends of globalisation and the pre-existing particulars of the local. Architecture, as a vehicle for transmitting collective meaning and significance, is no longer expressed with reference to a local community but has to do instead with a global culture. In this global culture, the character of the local context is mixed and hybridised with elements belonging to a transnational urban world where the forms of consumption, tourism and mobility are shown in the architectural language as much or more than local traditions or peculiarities. Thus, at a time when what is global seems to permeate every space and moment of urban life, it is worth relating the forms of contemporary architecture with current urban dynamics and the trends that are anticipated in the global process of urbanisation.
The seminar departs from these premises to propose different urban scenarios in which architecture is explained as a translation of the evolution of this process of urbanisation. In this way, the change in the space of the city is shown not only in the physical and infrastructural transformations, but above all in the forms of an architecture that goes along with the tension between the global and local that is characteristic of a world that is now definitively urban.
This course is recogonized by the Catalan Department of Education as on-going teacher training activity.
Coordinator: Francesc Muñoz
Programme
13-14, 20-21, 27-28 May, and 4 June at 7 pm
Thursday 13 May
Jordi Borja: Everything Local Dissipates into the...Global Air?
Friday 14 May
Carlos García Vázquez: Antipolis: the Disappearance of the Urban
Thursday 20 May
Andrew Kirby: Beyond Celebration. Urban Sprawl as a Global Urban Form
Friday 21 May
Lluís Ortega: Post-Urban Architectures
Thursday 27 May
Pablo Ciccolella: The Architecture of the Megapolis
Friday 28 May
Camilo Restrepo: Medellín, Operación Mestiza, from fear to hope
Friday 4 June
Winy Maas: The Death of the Leisure City
Tel. 93 481 79 00
pei [at] macba [dot] cat