Urban Design Research Studio

Catalog description

This course is a requirement for students enrolled in the Certificate of Urban Design. The Urban Design Research Studio (UDRC) is a capstone educational experience open to students of architecture, planning, landscape architecture and historic preservation in PennDesign. The studio's focus is how design intelligence can be applied to complex urban problems which are at once systemic and spatial. Reaching across scales and across disciplines the studio immerses students in the social, economic, political, ecological and aesthetic complexity of the contemporary city in a way that interweaves the speculative quality of the design process with the analytical and evidence-based empiricism of urban reseach. Interdisciplinary collaboration is the studio's modus operandi and its purpose is to develop techniques and strategies by which contemporary cities can become not only metabolically more efficient but also more edifying of the human spirit in the 21st century. Acceptance into the studio is based on interview and portfolio with priority placements given to students enrolled in the Urban Design Certificate Program.