City Imagined

Undergraduate / Graduate

This urban design studio course, split across two quarters, takes two distinct notions of the city as its starting point: grand, imaginative plans - utopian, unbuilt, semi-realized, real... both as aesthetic objects, and as ideas - and how the minute flows of day-to-day life, up from the smallest scale, enter into dialogue with built and lived details, intended or not. Drawing on both Chicago and other places chosen by students, we will dream small and big, search past and present, and tap precisely into what we dream and what we experience... seeking not to dictate what the city will be, but to use these different modes of understanding to expand our sense of what a city can be. Necessarily, through studio work, reading and seminar conversation, we'll grapple with difficult contradictions cities pose, our most central assumptions about spaces and places, and ways that cities change. We take as given the inevitable gap between how places actually evolve and how, perhaps, they could, and use that gap as a site for the imagination to step in, while also confronting the hubris of imagining cities real. Studio work will proceed in three stages: individually developing an alternate vision for a place you know well (winter), breaking each others' plans (winter into spring)... and finally, using real observations and spontaneity to complicate and rebuild your vision into something lovelier (spring). (Starting Nov 18, visit arthistory.uchicago.edu/archconsent to request consent.)