This studio is about hybrid multi-use building. We will address not only programmatic but also spatial hybrids. The labyrinth-like nature of urban reality, its rituals and events that create social networks, holds spatial potentials for an interior urbanism of hybridized spaces and programs. The modes of organization of so-called urban phenomena can result in unexpected subjectivities—creating a landscape of programmatic densifications, spatial sequences and intersecting movements between them.

The studio purports to explore an inductive design methodology, whereby architectural conclusions do not depend on the full and comprehensive collection of all the facts but can be made with incomplete evidence. Such inductive approaches are analogous to the process of combination, synthesis and doubling involved in collage and montage. Parts or fragments of particular conditions or qualities can be isolated and proposed prior to an understanding of the whole; these fragments can then be expanded over time, though a process of layering, evolving into investigations of greater complexity; elaborated as material, spatial, structural and programmatic prototypes to be deployed within alternative, multi-scalar contexts.

This seminar assesses the work of Rem Koolhass as a discourse on the notion of modern architecture. It examines writings, competitions and selected projects for strategies for theoretical and critical production and their application. We will identify the elements making up the work, examine the deployment of those elements and assess their points of impact in light of frameworks they originally targeted.

Koolhaas instrumentalises ways of operating associated with French thinking to introduce to architecture the larger discourse of art, philosophy and psychoanalysis. The multiplication of points of view was part of the expansion of the field of architecture as a cultural production of meaning, an effort made by architect – theoreticians to recuperate the authority of a profession radically shaken in the sixties by the failure of modern architecture. We will situate Koolhaas in the context from which he emerged as well as examine the work of offices that extend OMA practices.

This course explores techniques and modes of thought for addressing urban space. Selected subjects and ideas in modern and contemporary theory and design are investigated in the context of an historical background in order to address strategies informing architectural discourse and practice today. Discussions, readings and lectures cover themes such as capitalist practices and the metropolis, diagramming, program, scape and landscape, the semiotics of form, spatial psychology, surface effects, media and brandspace. Emphasis will be placed on the question of the urban that foregrounds varied conditions of form, space and territory through a series of comparative case studies, ranging from Yona Friedman's spatial structures to the planning of West 8 in Borneo Sporenburg.