Type: Master, Elective | Credit: 3 | ECTS Credit: 7.5
Architectural Design Futures
Dr. Imdat As – ias@itu.edu.tr
Thursdays 9:30-12:30
Content: The goal of the course is to incubate evocative ideas towards a startling vision for the future city. The question is how AI, IoTs, automation, self-driving cars, etc., will shape our urban fabric. We are primarily interested in urban design, but we will also investigate how these technologies are changing our society, economy, and shape urban life in general. We will explore the dramatic developments in digital and physical infrastructure, big data applications, participatory governance models, sustainability, housing/real-estate models, community, and new emerging economic models. The question is how transformations in these areas will impact the morphology of the future city. How would a city look like if we could design it from scratch today? By nature, pursuing such a question is highly speculative, and our goal is to develop a utopia for the city.
Aims: To discuss contemporary approaches to urban design through relevant theoretical positions and paradigms; to enable critical debate on the current state of the city, and to enable projections towards multiple futures of the city.
Learning outcomes: Being able to critically think, being able to conduct interdisciplinary research, being able to critically analyze, synthesize and evaluate new and complex thoughts, being able to develop and resolve scientific, cultural and ethical issues as it pertains to the discipline, and being able to develop strategies for a future vision.
Conduct: The questions derive mainly from the CIDDI (City Design through Design I telligence) project, which aims to develop a realizable vision for a future city project in Istanbul. Also,
the course will help shape a book commissioned to Imdat As and Prithwish Basu on the subject area. As such, the exploration and outcomes of this course will be critical to the success of the project and the book. We will have in-class discussions, weekly written assignments, and a final project at the end of the semester. We will focus each week on one of the abovementioned themes on the city. Every week, we will have seminal readings, and students will write short essays on the topic. A student (or group of) will take lead on one of the weekly themes — which student(s) will be also able to use and develop further as part of their final project. The grade distribution will be 30% for the final project, 50% for weekly essays, and 20% for participation and leading discussions in-class.
Our first meeting will be Thursday, February 13th, 9:30.
IMDAT AS BIO
Dr. Imdat As, is a Research Professor, and the recipient of the 2232 International Fellowship for Outstanding Researchers grant by TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey). Dr. As received his B.Arch. from METU (Middle East Technical University), his M.Sc. in Arch. from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and his doctorate from Harvard University. He co-authored, Dynamic Digital Representations in Architecture: Visions in Motion (Taylor & Francis, 2008). In 2011, he founded Arcbazar.com, a first-of -its-kind crowdsourcing platform for architectural design, which has been featured as one of the “Top 100 Most Brilliant Companies” by Entrepreneur Magazine. In 2017, he received a DARPA (US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) grant in collaboration with Raytheon, to use Arcbazar’s design data to generate conceptual designs via artificial intelligence, i.e. deep learning. Dr. As is currently working on CIDDI (City Design through Design Intelligence) and investigates the impact of emerging technologies on city form.