Being There is All the Fun

Understanding a city, neighborhood, or other Urban Designs in the way that they work economically and socially can be investigated in two ways that connect to the “primary and secondary resources” (powerpoint 3).  In each way, the designer learns information about a space that can help them design the space to be used in the best way.  Primary resources such as “Built form, street structure diagram, Network of public open space, Functional mix diagram, Interview, and Experience of place have in my personal experience given me the chance to be a better designer than looking at the information in data points and demographics of people.  Exploring a place before coming the conclusion of how the city should be expanded or how a neighborhood is going to interact with another neighborhood can be most well learned by physically understanding the area.

The first time that I experienced this feeling I was not participating in a studio or architecture class, I went to Italy, France, Germany, and England with my family.  During my time in all of those countries, I felt like I learned more about the culture of how the people live in these countries in addition to investigating the monuments.  I know from reading I have done in textbooks that I would not be able to learn all the information that I learned from physically being there from the books that I have read.

Now being in a classroom and studio environment other students and I have had to do site analysis and city analysis and I have learned how hard it is to understand the site completely until we have been able to go to the site.  This can be seen in my design process because I start my design with an idea that changes almost every time after I see the site because I want the feeling and understand how people move through and around the space.  The best experience I have had with being able to go to a site was in Moscow in second year studio where the program was a restaurant. During the first day of studio, we were able to go to the site.  In addition, my precedent for the project I had also physically been to this restaurant and seen the city that the restaurant was in and helped me design my project and pushed it further than I have pushed any project since.

As I progress through this class and think about how to understand and keep using Urban Design in my future, I want to use that knowledge for site analysis and other analysis in future projects.  This is will also effect the area of architecture that I want to go into, restoring and reiterating old buildings.  By knowing how a building connects to the past and current economy, demographics, network of spaces, and public opinions I can be a better Urban Designer and Architect.  I have seen this being used on a few HGTV shows when they are restoring a building or house in a neighborhood they investigate the surrounding area before they even start doing any demolition is that was needed to know what they might want to keep.