Fourth-year studios have been designed to target urban and pre-urban issues and topics to introduce the students to the reciprocal relationships between buildings and surrounding areas in terms of influenced-influencer to bring into attention the specific character and sense of place. This interaction between the architectural elements and the context needs analytical processes based on multi-decision makers importantly inhabitants. In this perspective, the studio focuses on the urban space-public space concept to bring life into the city through integration between infilled and unfilled design solutions. The second semester is oriented toward multidiscipline and authorities' effectiveness in the public space and public activities. For this objective, bringing an idea into Rwanda's context with respect to the social, economic, and environmental conditions will lead the students to proper design activities in the studio.
The Architectural Design studio VI focuses on the continuation of a work started in the first trimester concerning the project of a peri-urban settlement on the north east side of Murama Hill in Kigali. Students work in the same time on an urban scale with the concept of an urban plan, and on an architectural scale with the design of various housing typologies conceived as basic elements of the new settlement’s urban composition. Both on the urban scale and on the architectural scale, the project have to be developed in relation to the morfological context and the built environment existing on this side of the hill. So, the study of the existing territorial and urban patterns will precede the urban concept, and the study of existing groups of housing will precede the design of houses typologies. On the architectural scale, the use of earth as material of construction of buildings is considered a prerequisite of the project In the current trimester, that is the second project phase, students will develop the new urban settlment in more detail, and completing it with the project of open public spaces and public buildings, such as : market place, school/children center, health assistance centre, community/vocational cemtre. The challenge of the whole work is to deal with the complexity of a project where every element is not isolated but part of a system with an indispensable role to play.
Welcome to ARC4262 Architectural Practice & Entrepreneurship II!
This module explores methods of management of architectural practices of various sizes and forms, including the management of its financial and human resources, and the legislation related to these. The module will enable the student to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to manage a small architectural practice, and contribute to the management of a larger architectural practice.
1.0 Perspective
Process of human thought has been engaged with search, investigation, and cognition, as exterior and interior explorations in both environment and mind, in whole history of the world. So, this thoughtfulness character of the Man guides for inquiring the different aspects of phenomenon such as physical and nonphysical elements, aspects, and topics. According to studies of Foucault (Foucault, 1972), all historical knowledge of the Man has been included of both known and unknown aspects of our
environment, which, it could be researched, recognized, interpreted again time by time. Hence, architecture domain as the multiple scales of manmade built environment has been engaged with other areas of knowledge and science to explore, recognize, and identify people needs, materials specifications, and environmental productions. Therefore, in this area could address to some common knowledge such as static and dynamic mechanic, aesthetic, and physic. It can be remarkable, for instant, that some architects were engaged with science more than scientists were like Leonardo De Vinci were.
Indeed, architecture as physical, cultural, and environmental effectiveness profession changes both context and environment as architectural productions such as urban planning, urban design, and landscape architecture actions and interactions. However, it called as techniques or art all the times of history while those architectural tasks are interpretations of environment (Mugerauer, 1995; Gomez, 2003) to reinterpret, re-demonstrate, and redesign the universe. Therefore, this course has duty to introduce students with architectural working, in the urban environment, as a general context, to investigate in variety opinions, ideas, and imagines but in a real case study. Consequence, architectural research methodology combines wide area of knowledge, science, philosophy, logic, and approach that normally it selects by researchers to inquiry; however, for fresh researcher micro scale, obvious subject, and definable title has been recommended.
The course focuses of an essential and unavoidable phase of urban design: the urban composition. The étymos (deep meaning of a word) of the Latin term componere - from which the word composition comes - is "to lay with", that is to say to deal with the relations between the parts and the whole in order to obtain, in architectural as well in urban design, the structural harmony of architectural and urban forms.
But, beyond the similarity between architectural and urban composition, there is a fundamental difference due to the fact that architecture and the city don’t have the same temporal rhythm: if architecture is quickly renewed - and contemporary architecture even more than in the past - urban structures have to exist longer; if architectural design can have the purpose of freezing the image of a building, whose destiny is to disappear and to be replaced by another without modifying the context, urban design must have the purpose of setting up a process able to welcome a series of images of successive architectures.
Throughout learning and knowledge of standard elements (street, block, row buildings, big complex, etc.), the instruments variety according to the morphology (topology, geometry, sizing), composition modes (division, addition, multiplication, subtraction, etc.), composition tools, that is intervention modes and use of them (regulating lines, decoupage, occupation traces), and origins and experiences in history (invention of urban patterns, zoning, network), students will acquire the ability to recognize the principles of urban composition that generate and build the urban fabric structure of a city, and to choose appropriate tools in order to preserve character and identity of existent cities, or to work masterly and correctly on the generation of new urban settlements as urban designer.