This web site features the outcomes of the Fall 2001 Urban Studio, "Scenes on Hastings", a joint effort of the UBC Schools of Architecture, Community and Regional Planning, and the Landscape Architecture Program. The studio, offered during the fall of 2001, was directed by Professors Patrick Condon (Landscape Architecture Program), Penny Gurstein (School of Community and Regional Planning), Martin Lewis and Ali Shakarchi (School of Architecture),
 


Overview

The general aim of the UBC Urban Studio is to use urban design to explore emerging issues within the changing physical fabric of the Greater Vancouver Region and larger Georgia Basin. The site chosen for this year's Urban Studio is the Hastings Stree corridor.

The overarching goals of the UBC Urban Design Studio are

  • to design for people and their real needs;
  • to use form and structure to make "places;"
  • to understand the various schools of urban design thought and to experiment with their adaptation to local circumstances;
  • to provide a particular site with evocative visions for a complex and dynamic urbanism;
  • and to enhance the economic, social, and ecological sustainability of urban form, and of a selected part of the city in particular.

Studio Intent:

The study area for this year's studio is Hastings Street, from its origin in Downtown Vancouver to its termination below SFU in Burnaby. The intent of the studio is to provide ideas and visions for the disparate and complex urban armature of Hastings Street. Students in the combined studio involving planning, architecture, and landscape architecture will conduct the visioning project, working closely with citizens, elected officials and municipal staff for the first 6 - 7 week phase of the project. The second phase of the project will involve just planning and architecture students as landscape architecture students will be otherwise committed.

Studio Goal:

The goal of the 2001 Urban Studio is:

To instill in students a basic ability to grapple with the astonishingly complex competing demands made on urban space, and to contribute proposals for this contested ground that best resolve these competing demands.

Studio Objectives:

1. To survey a variety of cultural sources in order to develop and asses historical perspectives on the relationship of our physical real location in the world of the city (i.e. our life in our body) and how the city reflects (or denies) that reality.
  2. To understand the complex interface between competing visions of public and private space in the city, as demonstrated by different schools of thought within the design and planning communities, and varying points of view from area constituents and stakeholders.
  3. To use the map (G.I.S.) as a means to find, critique, and represent the competing visions of the city, both cultural and ecological.
  4. To provide the Burnaby and Vancouver with evocative visions for a complex and dynamic new urban circumstance.
  5. To enhance the economic, social, and ecological sustainability of the city, and of this important transect in particular.
  6. To anticipate change and provide an urban architecture that is capable of both change and persistence in the face of rapidly evolving social and economic circumstances.


Learning Outcomes:

By the end of this class students will know how to:

  1. Interpret various maps of the city's cultural and physical infrastructure
  2. Understand certain key philosophical/political paradigms as they relate to intervening in the city (i.e. City Planning, Urban Design, and Urban Redesign).
  3. Arrive at defensible proposals (defended on specific ideological, economic, ecological, or social bases) for intervening in the city.
  4. Learn how our body, our being human, influences what we see, feel, know, and believe - use this understanding as the basis for appropriate and defensible design intervention.
  5. Use mapping as a means of making "architectural" proposals (architecture understood in its broadest possible sense) at scales between on block and 100 square kilometers.
  6. Learn how to collaboratively produce a voluminous body of work produced.



THANK YOU!

We owe a great deal of thanks to the City of Vancouver for providing support for the production of this website and the graphic material contained herein.