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final examFinal Exam Format
ALL READINGS ARE AVAILABLE UNDER EITHER: COA 1060 ONLINE RESERVES: under either KHAN or ZIADA COA 1011 ONLINE RESERVES: under KHAN ON THE READINGS PAGE ON COOLDAZE http://cool.coa.gatech.edu/cooldaze/753 EXAM STUDY QUESTIONS 1 Rebecca Solnit begins her extended paraphrase of de Certeau and Bailly (p. 213) with “Walkers are ‘practitioners of the city’, for the city is made to be walked. . . a city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language.” She suggests that de Certeau’s metaphor presents a “frightening possibility: that if a city is a language spoken by walkers, then a postpedestrian city not ony has fallen silent but risks becoming a dead language, one whose colloquial phrases, jokes, and curses will vanish, even if its formal grammar survives.” First explain how each of the "theorists of walking" that Solnit references (DeBord, de Certeau, Bailly) suggest that walkers “practice” or “perform” the city. What is the relationship between the act of walking and the physical configuration of city streets? How do streets generate stories? Next, draw upon your experiences of the cities and neighborhoods (where you lived or visited) to comment on these notions: Have you ever practiced or performed a city? Finally, what does this formulation say about cities and neighborhoods (and about the people who live there) where walking is not standard operating procedure. References Lectures: Hazem Ziada Readings: Solnit, Rebecca, “Paris, or Botanizing on the Asphalt." Sorkin, Michael, "Traffic in Democracy." Solnit, Rebecca, "The Solitary Stroller." Solnit, Rebecca, "Aerobic Sisyphus and the Suburbanized Psyche". Kirshenblatt Gimblett: "Performing the City". 2 Prof. Flamming’s lecture discusses the “idea” of Atlanta as a city of growth. Prof. Allen’s lecture and Crimmins’s article, “Atlanta Palimpsest: Stripping Away the Layers of the Past,” on the other hand, deal with the history of “form” and “impresses” that have made today’s Atlanta. First, summarize how Flamming, Allen, and Crimmins apply the notions of “idea” and “form” to Atlanta. Second, apply these notions to at least two other cities that we have discussed - for example: New Orleans, Philadelphia, or Savannah (from Prof. Allen’s lecture); the European medieval city (from Jackson, J.B., “The Discovery of the Street”); Paris (from Solnit, Rebecca, “Paris, or Botanizing on the Asphalt”); or any other city you are familiar with. Third, speculate upon the relationship between the “idea” and the “form” of a city. Does the “idea” influence the “form,” or vice versa? How do different “ideas” result in different “forms,” or vice versa? References. Lectures: Prof. Flamming; Prof. Allen. Readings: Hayden, Delores, “The Evolution of American Housing.” Jackson, J.B., “The Discovery of the Street.” Crimmins, Timothy, “Atlanta Palimpsest: Stripping Away the Layers of the Past.” Newman, Harvey, “Decatur Street: Atlanta’s African American Paradise Lost.” Solnit, Rebecca, “Paris, or Botanizing on the Asphalt." Duany, Andres, "What is Sprawl and Why?" 3 Katherine McCoy’s “Good Citizenship” points out the problem of giving personal values to a design within a society of cultural diversity. Rosalyn Deutsche’s “Tilted Arc and the Uses of Democracy” shows a good example of how a design can actually address certain values. First, summarize McCoy’s argument focusing on the issues of modernist abstraction, content, and context. Identify from the text the author’s strategy to express values within design. Second, explain how Deutsche understands the idea of public space and democracy, as made explicit in her discussion of issues surrounding the “Tilted Arc” controversy. Third, see if you can criticize McCoy’s strategy by using the “Tilted Arc” example. How are the “content” and/or the “context” addressed within the “Tilted Arc?” References. Readings: Deutsche, Rosalyn, “Tilted Arc and the Uses of Democracy.” McCoy, Katherine, “Good Citizenship.” 4 In their lectures both Monica Ponce de Leon and Franca Trubiano discussed how material and technological limits can, if seen as possibilities, can serve as generators for design. Examine and critique your own studio exercise 2 in terms of this formulation. First, briefly identify three projects from these lectures that exemplify these moments. Second, select three moments from within your design process where material and technological limits (media, materials, and the techniques/technologies used for description/representation) played a significant role in design Third, discuss how these moments, and your response to them, sponsored design evolution and/or transformation. Finally, with the benefit of hindsight, speculate on other ways in which you could have responded to these moments (and what the transformative effect would have been). Draw upon the strategies of others in your section (or in other sections) to aid your speculation. References. Lectures: Prof. Ponce de Leon; Prof. Trubiano 5 Compare and contrast designated and designed public space with “leftover” or residual open space that is appropriated and used as public space. Refer to concepts and examples from the following readings/lectures as examples: References. Readings: Sorkin: Introduction: Traffic in Democracy Cuthbert and McKinnell: Ambiguous Spaces Solnit: The Solitary Stroller and the City (both excerpts) Crawford: "Introduction" and "Blurring the Boundaries" (same pdf) Borden: "Another Pavement Another Beach: Skateboarding and a Performative Critique of Architecture" Kirshenblatt Gimblett: "Performing the City". 6 Don Norman, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Things, critiques the design of everyday things (objects, products, interfaces, building elements, etc.), suggesting that designers fail to make things “understandable and usable”. The “answer” to how an object works should, he says, “be given by the design, without any need for words or symbols, certainly without any need for trial and error” (emphasis added). With this statement Norman raises the bar for designers, setting, one could argue, impossible standards for designers. (This may be because Norman, after all, is not a designer himself and is therefore, perhaps, unfamiliar with the nature of the design process). He does however introduce a series of concepts and constructs that can help designers incorporate different points of view into their design process. First, summarize the various concepts and terms Norman introduces (affordances, mappings, constraints, mental and conceptual models). Next discuss these concepts making reference to the object analysis you carried out in Ex 3: give specific examples of how Norman’s analytical framework applies to the object you analyzed. (If you are not in COA 1011, you may analyze a familiar object or interface, like Buzzport, for example). Finally turn your design intelligence on to Norman himself in order to critique the design assignment he sets for his students (multiple-function clock radio). Analyze the assignment (the ways he sets it up and his explicit and implicit expectations) to speculate on his assumptions (mental models?) of what design is and how it proceeds. Based on your understanding of the design process, would you also rate the example he provides as a “completely unacceptable” solution to the assignment? 7 Professors Allen and Dagenhart, in their four lectures during class, and in their co-authored article, “You Are How You Subdivide”, extend Churchill’s observation regarding the symbiosis of people and buildings (“we shape our buildings and then they shape us”) to the American landscape. Both argue that the subdivision of land sets up an enduring framework that determines social forms and norms: both the kinds of cities possible and the sorts of lives that take place within them. The subdivision of the American landscape – from the Law of the Indies and the Land Ordinance of 1785 to the layouts of cities and postwar suburban subdivisions – provides numerous examples of the way in which patterns, elements, and dimensions implicit within subdivision strategies determine the shape of the physical environment and of society. After reviewing the lectures and the aforementioned article, give at least five specific examples of the way in which particular patterns, dimensions, and/or arrangements of elements influence urban form and social fabric. Pick examples from different periods and at different scales (for example, from the scale of the landscape to the city block and the parking stall). Next, rehearse the role ‘pattern’ and dimensional relationships played in the evolution of your cube in Ex 2. What were the advantages that this ‘hidden’ prior order provided you? Speculate on what would have happened had no prior pattern or dimensional order been present. (If you are not in COA 1011, find an example of this from everyday life). 8 Andrew Blauvelt, in “Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life”, talks about the “paradoxical presence” of design in our lives; that despite its “ . . . ubiquity, design remains for many people a mysterious force”. Rehearse the reasons Blauvelt gives for design’s visibility/invisibility? Speculate on how design ‘announces’ itself, and makes itself ‘visible’? Can design ‘reveal’ itself without recourse to style, novelty, gimmickry? In developing the notion of “Design and Everyday Life”, Blauvelt summarizes the idea of the ‘everyday’ as it was developed by Lefebvre, de Certeau, and Perec, applying it to work included in the show, “Strangely Familiar”, curated by him. Based on this material (and on your own experience in COA 1011), speculate on how a consideration of the ‘ordinary’, or of ‘everyday life’, may prove useful to a designer. What advantages are there to be gained from a “poetic inquisition of the everyday”? 9 In his article, "Traffic in Democracy", Sorkin argues that "urban density and movement through it has to be thought through politically [emphasis added]. . . rather than approached merely as a set of technical problems". What does he mean by this? What are the values implicit within 'rational' traffic systems? How does he see 'traffic' furthering or hindering the sense of community, of publicness, of democracy? Sorkin introduces three terms: 'giving ground'; 'propinquity'; 'liquidity of association' that may prove useful in analyzing contemporary urban and suburban conditions. First give a brief description of what Sorkin means by each, then apply the three to an analysis of typical conditions within the contemporary American urban and suburban landscape (for example, suburban road systems; gated communities; privatized roads, etc.). You may draw examples from your own experience, and from other readings and lectures. Two articles may be particularly helpful: Duany, "What is Sprawl, and Why?", and Russell, James, "Privatized Lives: On the Embattled 'Burbs". 10 Race is a significant factor in the shaping of the American built environment. Its affect on the physical form and social fabric of American cities, in the past and in the present, manifests itself in explicit and implicit ways: from the affect of race riots to subdivision covenants to the more subtle policies of mortgage redlining. Review the five articles assigned for 09.13. (You may also want to skim through Bullard, "Dismantling Transportation Apartheid" and Torres, "Closed Doors: Persistent Barriers to Fair Housing"). Select examples from three of the articles to discuss further. Be specific about the way considerations of race, and racism, inflect and shape American cities. 11 The conflict between public rights (First Amendment, customary rights of use) and private property raise serious issues about the quality of public life in contemporary America. Hazem Ziada, in his two lectures on public space, offers different ways in which to define public space: in contrast to private space and in terms of itself. He makes a distinction between "public as a practice" (feeling public thru user or experience) and "public as a legal framework of rights and responsibilities". Margaret Kohn, in "The Mauling of Public Space", references both in her account of various court cases where the shopping mall is at the center of this debate/conflict. First, summarize what the opposing arguments have been in the cases mentioned in the Kohn article. Why is the 'shopping mall' at the center of these debates? Are there other kinds of spaces where similar conditions exist? Next, speculate upon why these debates and court cases are important. What is at stake? Make specific reference to other readings and lectures (Ziada, Sennett, etc.). 12 Mary Ryan, in her introduction to "Civic Wars", reminds of Tocqueville's observations of nineteenth-century America: the "democratic associations of people" that gave rise to democratic institutions and to a sense of the "civic whole", in urban spaces that were "open, accessible" where people could "actually see each other in all their diversity and [could] mobilize, debate, form identities, forge coalitions. . . " She expresses concern that Americans may be "withdrawing from civic space. . from everyday encounters with one another". William Mitchell, in "Electronic Agoras", suggests that cyberspace provides an equally powerful alternative to the crowded, contested, civic spaces that Ryan describes. In setting up a debate between the two positions, first rehearse the arguments of each. Then describe from readings and from personal experience examples that validate one (or both) positions: "face-to-face" encounters with fellow Americans in public space, whether in physical or virtual environments. 13 We began this semester with an assignment (08.25) that asked you to describe a street where you live or once lived focussing on the relationship between its physical and social characteristics. Over the course of the semester, a range of readings and lectures have introduced you to many different ways of talking about design and the built environment. We would like you to now revisit the street described in your first essay and analyze it in terms of a particular set of issues set forth in a particular set of lectures and/or readings. The choice of readings/lectures is entirely up to you. We want to see how the readings/lectures you select allow you to analyze/redescribe the street in ways you were not capable of during the first week of the semester. The challenge here is to be specific: apply knowledge, terms, concepts, and constructs from particular lectures/readings to carefully unpack/playback the street in question. THATS IT, A BAKER'S DOZEN OF QUESTIONS. WITH ONLY THIRTEEN TO PREPARE, GIVE THEM THE EFFORT AND QUALITY OF THOUGHT THEY DESERVE. SK |
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