The studio explores the formal, socio-spatial, and disciplinary consequences of the ideological acceptance of the vast field of urbanization as ne beyond the confines of compact, historic city, as well as beyond the conventions and types of architecture as a constitutive element of such a city. Such a post-urban ideology, itself the almost inevitable result of mass suburbanization witnessed any globalizing economy, is premised on the fact that the entirety of our lives is now urban, yet our common overall density is thinner than ever. On scales vastly magnified my means of automobile as well as other transit technologies, architecture, once operating on a scale to effectively organize the public life of the pedestrian, now confronts scales and orders vastly beyond its own historical perimeter. The logical scale limits of architectural order form one thread through the studio - and the necessary expansion of its formal thinking to include modes of operation hitherto reserved for landscape ecology, or for transportation engineering. The problem of representation and centrality forms another theme across the various exercises sketches below. he underlying question here is - can it be possible to organize a sense of publicness and shared experience in a space as dispersed as our suburbs? And if this space could exist, what are the formal attributes it demands? A third theme concerns the acceptance of the elements endogenous to suburban development as well as the ways in which its inhabitants appropriate it; in other words, our address of non-compact urbanization is not about a denial of its constitutive syntax, but rather attempts to understand its underlying logics and formal structure in order to crystallize, sharpen and from there, transform it.

Exercise 1:
Form-Giving Infrastructures and the Regional Scale

Exercise 2:
Ideology and Form
The Relation Between Aesthetic Technique and Political Ideal in Urban Design

Exercise 3:
Megaform Strategies: Formalisms beyond Architecture

Exercise 4:
Typo-Morphologies. Big Boxes, Parking Lots, and Buffer Spaces

Exercise 5:
Contours of a Post-Urban American City: The Design of an Intermodal TOD District in a Middle Ring Suburb