Impending Final Reviews 8 December 2006

The Public Square Studio is nearing an end. The three groups are participating in final documentation, model building, diagramming, and rhetorical editing in these final days.

The three groups are interested and speculating about these subjects and how they are motivated within a re-constituted Public Square:

1. Spectacle enhancement, harvesting, and deployment in concert with city infrastructures
2. Intellectual Grazing Fields
3. Disseminated modulated Intensities, Armatures, Landscapes, and Programs

Please look for posted images, discussion points, notions, and debates later next week.

STUDIO UPDATE 27 SEPTEMBER 2006

Students have started to tackle the re-design of Public Square.

Three very different schemes/systems are beginning to emerge:

1. Multipli-cities of Spectacle Infrastructure
2. Intellectual Grazing Fields
3. Denisty-calibrated + modulated public space generators

Look for rapid progress in the next two weeks.

STUDIO UPDATE [19 SEPTEMBER 2006]

The studio continues to engage in precedent analysis and the deployment of precedent tactics into Public Square. The students are testing the tactics of precedents of varying scales and scopes, including the following: Central Park (NYC), La Villette (Paris), High Line (NYC), Steel Cloud (LA), Millenium Park (Chicago), Downsview Park (Toronto), Kahn's Philadelphia Traffic Studies, Rockefeller Center (NYC), Piazza d'Italia (New Orleans), Loyola Law School (LA), University of Virginia, and 1933 Century of Progress Exposition (Chicago). Some of the studies can be viewed in various posts below. More should be posted soon.

Students will execute one more round of predecent analysis, research public space altering technologies, and then commence the re-design of Public Square. Initial designs will begin to be posted and discussed by the end of September.

STUDIO UPDATE [12 September 2006]

The studio has been involved in information and data gathering, analysis and diagramming. The students were free to pursue any information that may inform, influence, or reflect the constitution of Public Square. How many people drive through Public Square everyday? How many people engage with the RTA Transit system via Tower City or Pulic Square? Who owns all the land surrounding Public Square? What is the current vacancy rate around the Square? Where do tourists go when they visit Downtown Cleveland? How many people live downtown? How many people live downtown? What are the professional and educational attaninment demographics of downtown residents? Many of these questions were answered or will be answered.

We will be looking at infrastructural, architectural, and technological precedents, discerning strategies and tactics, and applying the systems to Public Square in the next two weeks. As we begin testing and designing, images will be posted.

Welcome to our studio blog. For the fall semester we will be speculating about the function, relevance, and constitution of Cleveland's Public Square while contemplating the churning character of American common space.

Students will be routinely posting their research, analysis, and design work throughout the semester.

Please see the studio brief below.

This studio seeks to investigate the notion of the American commons, how it should be created and what would substantiate its constitution. We will study and analyze different precedents, conditions, technologies, and projects. The studio will speculate and hybridize tactics, systems, flows, and data and then incorporate normative programs with alternative space functions and utilizations. Buildings, infrastructures, fragments, enclosures, etc. will then emerge, informed by the analytical and speculative milieu.

Architecture and Urban Design are not separate endeavors. This studio seeks to inculcate the integration of the architectural projects within the ensemble and planning conceit. The architectures which will evolve throughout the design process will not reside as autonomous objects, but rather will further engender the informed pursuit of the speculation.

The studio does not seek to wax romantically about the historic public square. New formulations about American common space will be requisite. The resulting projects will be speculations about the future of American common space and public architectures, how these spaces will function, how these frameworks will be construed, and how these architectural amalgams may be anticipated to change.

Our research and speculations will focus upon the redesign of Cleveland's Public Square and the design of a civic / government building.