The School of Architecture is launching a new Master of Urban Design degree program, which will focus on contemporary urban issues through a unique blend of architectural, landscape and planning perspectives. The post-professional degree program, to be offered beginning in fall 2001, will combine coursework with research design studios tackling community projects.
"The new one-year degree program is targeted at professional architects, landscape architects and planners who wish to further their knowledge base and become conversant in the contemporary metropolitan issues faced in the practice," said Jacqueline Tatom, assistant professor of architecture and co-director of the program. "It will offer the opportunity to become directly involved in broad-based solutions to some of the most intransigent design problems of American cities today."
Tim Franke, program co-director and assistant professor of architecture, added: "The Master of Urban Design program will tackle a diverse set of problems through a cross-disciplinary approach to metropolitan design. While very few programs nationally train professionals from a multidi-sciplinary approach, such collaboration has become essential to addressing the complexity of today's metropolitan issues."
Dean Cynthia Weese, FAIA, noted that the program builds on the school's longstanding tradi-tion of addressing urban issues through high-quality, innovative design. "Faculty and students lending their design expertise to community solutions have been a hallmark of this school," she said. "The new . . . program will provide a formal means of combining our strengths in urban design, architectural design and landscape design to address issues so essential to the future of American cities."
At the core of the new program will be three intensive studio experiences. An initial speculative studio will stress the importance of design solutions that combine architecture, landscape and planning. A metropolitan research studio will tackle long-term design issues facing the St. Louis region. Over time, successive studios will build on previous ones, allowing the program to focus on solutions in ongoing projects for the community's benefit. A summer studio, Visions in Process, will engage students in an on-site studio with an eminent practitioner in a metropolitan area outside St. Louis. It will include a studio-based design component at the school and yield specific design proposals.
"Studio projects could range from assisting communities in redeveloping brownfield sites to preserving ecologically sensitive systems to creating mixed-use, sustainable development," said Franke, a partner at Third Land, a St. Louis-based architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning and design firm. "The multidisciplinary approach will allow us to . . . help communities determine suitable alternatives for future growth, preservation and sustainability at many levels."
The new degree program will engage students in issues including public space, transportation, infrastructure, de-urbanization, environmental sustainability, land development, housing and revitalization. Design strategies will strive to offer a view independent of political concerns but acknowledging the regional nature of contemporary urban problems, said Tatom, who directs the school's Metropolitan Research and Design Center.
"The overall framework will be to consider the metropolitan landscape as a spectrum of conditions that are not just urban or suburban, but part of an overlapping metropolitan context," she said.
The program will offer core areas of concentration in environmental systems; community development; history and theory of the metropolitan landscape; representation, computing, methods and models; and urban technology and infrastructure. It will draw on the expertise of architecture faculty and other visiting academics and professionals at the forefront of urban design.
"We are eager to begin the Master of Urban Design program, whose innovative approach promises a new educational framework for addressing today's complex urban issues," Weese said.
