Assignment Content
Portfolio #3 – Built Environments & Urban Forms
The ‘built environment’ is a phrase that we use to describe all the diverse human-generated material objects and contexts that make our urban lives possible: Everything from traffic lights to opera houses, government buildings to dumpsters, crosswalks to formal parks, telephone towers and subway lines. While these environments function in a variety of ways, many of their functions fall under the two relations that define our approach to the European city:
Built environments connect. They link – materially, imaginatively, symbolically, infrastructurally – people and the places they live to other people and other places. They help to define a shared sense of ‘us’.
But they also border. These borders can be tangible and physical – walls and fences – but they can also be communicated through other forms of imagined and symbolic norms, making certain groups feel as though they do not belong.
For this exercise, pick one building from each of your two cities, Vienna, Austria and Paris, France(it could be one, it could be a group, it could even be a type of building). Examples could include:
Social/public housing
Municipal government buildings
Religious buildings
Museums
Skyscrapers
Factories
Parks & public spaces
Bridges
Transportation hubs
Anything else that comes to mind
Once you’ve chosen these buildings, you should answer the following questions:
When were these buildings built? By who?
Based on what you’re able to figure out, why was each building built? Who there built for? This should involve discussing the social context (i.e., the different groups of people living in the city), the historical context (i.e., the 1920s were different than the 1990s), and the spatial context (e.g., where in the city matters).
Reflect: Did these buildings create some kind of border (Was it for some people but not others? Did it communicate dominance or power in the city?) while also connecting itself to other cities (Through style, function, etc.)?
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