Environment and Space Organization

Recommended Prerequisites

Basic knowledge about urban culture and sustainable development.

Teaching Methods

- Presentation of the themes using intensive image viewing. Debate with students (student-student and student-teacher) on the examples presented.

- Resolution (by students, individually or in small groups, or by the teacher) of cases illustrative of the practical interest and relevance of the themes, and the selection of different decision aiding strategies.

- Role-playing.

Learning Outcomes

The course addresses issues of culture and organization of architectural space. It focuses on the understanding that they are essential to address the phenomena of  population density and urban sprawl. Promotes clarification procedures required between the natural and built environment, creating operational bases that allow the overcoming of the misconceptions commonly associated with sustainable prosperity and development. Introduces the need to use sustainable design strategies in cities.
O1. Knowing the concepts and steps of the history of sustainable development;
O2. Justifying the integration of environmental strategies, as a conceptual paradigm, in the drawings of urban space and architecture;
O3. Experiencing the complexity of adaptation and mitigation to climate changes;
O4. Justifying an imperative inclusion of sustainable design strategies in the early stages of architectural design;
O5. Recognizing methodologies and  multi-scale approach to urban conception.

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

1. Architectural urban culture

   1. Reset concepts: urban, rural hybrid

   2. Urban sprawl and contemporary diffused territories

   3. Urban history, density and demography

2. Environment and Society

   1. Concepts: green; ecological; bioclimatic and sustainable design

   2. Background and what is being done

3. Environmental strategies: new paradigm in architecture

   1. Problematic and structuring

   2. Climate changes – adaptation and mitigation – energy and CO2

4. Designing and planning the sustainable city

   1. Earth: landscape, place, solar geometry – tectonics, materials and technologies

   2. Air: winds, cooling and environmental conditioning – indoor and urban

   3. Water: the resource, hydraulic network management and risks

   4. Fire: lighting, heating, solar gains and energies – embodied and operational

   5. Life: humans and biodiversity; comfort and life quality

   6. Merger, symbiosis, holistics and conflicting dimensions in multiscale approach to design projects.

Head Lecturer(s)

João Paulo Vergueiro Monteiro de Sá Cardielos

Assessment Methods

Assessment
Research work: 40.0%
Exam: 60.0%

Bibliography

BANHAM, Reyner, The architecture of the well-tempered environment, London, The Architectural Press, 1984 [1ª. Ed. 1969].

BANHAM, Reyner, Los Angeles: the architecture of four ecologies, Los Angeles, Harper and Row, 1971.

BORJA, Jordi, La Ciudad Conquistada, Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 2003.

FRAMPTON, Keneth, Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2001.

KWINTER, Stanford, Architectures of Time. Towards a Theory of Event in Modernist Culture, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2002.

HAGAN, Susannah, Taking Shape: The New Contract between Architecture and Nature, Architectural Press, Oxford, 2001.

HAGAN, Susannah, Nature, Landscape and Building for Sustainability, ed. William Saunders, “Five Reasons to Adopt Environmental Design,” University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London, 2008.

ROSSI, Aldo, L’architettura della città, Pádua, Marsilio, 1966.