Jordi Vivaldi

The 20th century has produced a set of theoretical urban reflections that are at the core of the urban environments that we have inherited in the 21st century. Authors such as Le Corbusier, Kevin Lynch, Aldo Rossi or Rem Koolhaas have widely written on the notion of “city”, and its texts have deeply influenced the way we perceive, analyse, design and inhabit our urban spaces. However, the 21st-century presents an economical, socio-political and environmental condition whose extreme parameters cannot be approached anymore through those registers.

This Seminar is based upon the conviction that the current demand for new urban paradigms related to the 21st-century does not imply an erasure of the key texts that have guided our urbanism during the 20th century. Instead, its knowledge is fundamental in order to understand the activity of urban design as a specific body of knowledge, as an aesthetic sensibility and as a strategic vision. After exploring the principles that are the core of  7 key texts of 20th century urbanism, the Seminar will present 10 new urban paradigms related to the 21st-century city and will explore connections, alliances and complementations in between both approaches in order to theoretically underpin the Studio Design.

Selected key texts: Athens Charter, Le Corbusier, 1933; The image of the City, Kevin Lynch, 1960; The Architecture of the city, Aldo Rossi, 1966; The City in the City, Oswald Mathias Ungers, 1977; Collage City, Collin Rowe, 1978; Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas, 1978; The Manhattan Transcripts, Bernard Tschumi, 1981.