5 1 : 1BACHELOR'S DEGREE PROGRAM

The objective of S05 “Architectural and Urban Design” is to provide students with the fundamental skills required for urban design. This workshop has several goals:

- To understand urban forms and the processes by which the city is shaped as a system of interaction between buildings, land division, public space, and geography, at various scales and within a specific territory; to understand these different scales and know how to represent them.

- To understand and represent the relationship between public and private space

- To develop an urban and architectural project as a process of transforming the urban fabric based on what already exists.

- To learn to navigate the interactions between built structures, land parcels, and public space /// to understand architectural structures in relation to the urban fabric, the landscape, and the environment, rather than as isolated objects.



Both in terms of analyzing and describing the city and in terms of the project itself, the work follows a dual approach:

- A territorial and contextualized approach that addresses the forms and hierarchies of the urban structure, their evolution, and their articulation at different scales (territory, city, and neighborhood).
- An approach to transforming the “ordinary” urban fabric based on the manipulation of residential architectural typologies and their combinations with land-readjustment processes and the relationship to public space.

This year, the introductory urban design workshop will focus on developing an architectural housing project at a scale that allows students to address and understand:
- The main architectural typologies (multi-family, mid-rise, townhouses, etc.) and common dimensional parameters (depth, height, etc.)
- Principles of building placement within a given site: relationship to the city (addressing/ground floor level), relationship to property boundaries (adjacent properties, setbacks, etc.), and views between built structures; the types and uses of unbuilt residential spaces (courtyards, open courtyards, gardens, etc.),
- Distribution systems (“from the street to the dwelling’s front door,” “from the most public to the most private”), common areas


The Introductory Workshop on Urban and Architectural Design will be closely aligned with the lectures and the “Atlas of Urban Forms” tutorial, including a 3-day trip to Brussels where several housing projects will be visited and analyzed, as part of a curriculum that closely intertwines analysis, hands-on exercises, and project design, at various scales and using diverse representation methods ranging from the landscape to the building (from 1:25,000 to 1:100).


PROJECT SITE

The site chosen for this year’s project workshop is the municipality of Maromme, located in the Cailly Valley.

This already heavily urbanized area offers numerous advantages for meeting the workshop’s educational objectives:

- Its proximity to the school facilitates sensory observation and a concrete understanding of the municipality’s territorial characteristics, as well as its existing urban and architectural forms. Careful observation and representation of what “already exists” are expected prior to any transformation project.

- An area already undergoing change, with the potential for “city-on-city” transformation that can contribute to the sustainable development of the Rouen metropolitan area and the improvement of its neighborhoods.

- A wide range of identified sites and contexts for developing urban and architectural project proposals
Both the analytical and design work will be multiscale, ranging from understanding the challenges at the metropolitan and Valley scales to the transformation of one or more city blocks and the definition of a site-specific architectural project.