Given how many times GSAPP's architecture faculty are using the word
“urban” at their lottery presentations, I find myself wondering where the
actual education in urban design stands in this circus of self-declared
urbanists. Architecture in the expanded field of space making is well on the
way to becoming the only means of addressing urban problem statements. There
is, of course, the planning field, which often applies a hands-off approach
to spatial experience and physical identity. While urbanists throughout the
last decades or so left the urban in pursuit of landscape, they allowed
architecture to fill in the gaps, literally.

The makeshift urbanism that arises from those architectural solutions is
just Big Architecture, as Moji Baratloo has put it. I'm not against the
critical note that outsiders can add to an urban discussion, but the
deafening silence – as if in a ghost city – of urbanists in the sustainable
cities symposia and conferences at GSAPP, for instance, seems odd. And while
architects deal with urbanism and urbanists wander in the realm of landscape
urbanism, architecture has developed a parasitical relationship with
landscape, in the form of green roofs and vegetated walls. Within this
rotated realm of expertise, our practice aims at questioning architecture
through urban concepts. Let's reclaim urbanism by committing architecture.

Within a school that is so much invested in form making, the urban design
program holds a peculiar position. Of course student group work naturally
tends to produce compromise instead of formal rigor. The idea of advanced
architectural design is not at the forefront of the urban design educational
experiment. While the systemic investigations and multiple temporalities are
key to understanding the often complex studio sites and topics, the actual
AUD design interventions display mostly undercooked and often uninspired
placeholder forms. I strongly feel that through the actual design of
buildings we could just as well address urban goals. Nothing new of course
one might say, however this is rarely part of the discussion in urban design
education.

GSAPP under Mark Wigley's deanship has been steering full steam ahead
towards the notion of “dissolving the institute”. One could take advantage
of this moment to redefine the role of urban design education and actively
engage with architectural form production as a means to interact with the
urban field. In the dispersed field of space making can we not move beyond
addressing the territory as our main concern but we can can we equally
dissolve the expertise boundaries and start to tackle architectural
questions with urban strategies? Over the last few years I have found myself
steering my practice back to the architectural scale in order to address the
physical and personal experience of spatial concepts. This is by no means a
detachment from urbanism, but rather an expansion of urban praxis by
stretching it throughout a wide range of scales. Reclaiming the design
object can be a true urban statement. Forgive me, if you must, for
committing architecture.