Design, Module, and Excursion: Bucharest

The educational objective of this project is to put students in a position where they recognize the problems and potentials of concrete situations, are able to formulate pertinent planning questions, and can answer these questions using contemporary urban-planning resources. Through topical tasks, students are to experience urban development as a comprehensive interdisciplinary exploration and to address it as a design-related challenge, including its social, economic, ecological, and processual implications. The mediation of adequate methods of analysis, planning, and rendering is an essential facet of the coursework.
Essential course content includes a confrontation with concrete situations both in urban agglomerations and in urban peripheries or rural areas. The design process encompasses the critical analysis of the population, the discussion of urban-planning guiding concepts in general, the conceptualization of site-specific development strategies, the elaboration of urban-planning designs, as well as their visualization and presentation. Here, the planning-related analysis ranges from the scale level of regional and urban development to questions related to building typologies or even the details of city design. The point is to hone sensibility when dealing with Eastern Europe and to investigate local contexts and circumstances of urban-planning and sociological nature. Romania, with its capital city of Bucharest, provides the framework for the objective of this design program. Based on an analysis, an urban-planning concept will be developed for a transformation area of former industrial use. The objective is to densify this centrally situated area, to discover new ideas for use, and thus also to strengthen Bucharest’s downtown area. The design spectrum ranges from large-scale concepts to the formation of concrete building typologies. Specifically, the expansion tendencies of the city are to be addressed, which form the economic and social center of this young EU member state.