In Delirious New York (1997), Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas re-imagines the modern city in the Manhattan grid
by Aneesha Dharwadker
An education in architecture requires patience, stamina, and certain amount of finesse. As a student, I managed to learn something of all three, primarily in the context of the design studio. I studied in a five-year professional program in a small town in central New York, where I could not help but concentrate on my work. Cornell University is rather like a mountain kingdom from another time, and its architecture program is saturated in a formalist pedagogy of the 1970s. While the curriculum is rigid, there is certainly room for experimentation. And, perhaps most importantly, there is the opportunity to experience the world and bring new ideas back to the studio.
In the year between May 2007 and May 2008, I traveled extensively through Europe and India as both an independent researcher and a study abroad student. This year was an experiment in comparative urbanisms: my understanding of design matured dramatically through an immersion in different eastern and western cities. While I spent the majority of my time in New Delhi, India, and Rome, Italy, there were smaller places in between where I gained a great appreciation for what design has accomplished (especially during modernism) and what design might be today. It was the time abroad that cleared my head, and allowed me to refine ideas about the relationship of architecture to culture and how that affects the formation of the modern city.
Understanding the role of architecture in the 21st century will ultimately derive from understanding the role of cities as global participants. These are the sites of social, political, and economic import, and of historical and cultural density. Urban architecture is a manifestation of this density (manifest density, if you will), and today, the architecture takes on multiple responsibilities. In addition to acting as cultural and geographical icons, buildings today attempt to sustain themselves naturally, taking advantage pre-existing conditions, like sun and wind, and harnessing them for energy. Architecture must deal with aesthetic and practical issues simultaneously, and as we continually put strain on our resources, the need for this balance is all the more pressing. It is in the cities that these ideas have already begun to appear and develop, and at the rate that we now exchange information, the ideas can spread globally in a moment.
We are at a turning point now, where architecture must accept multiple responsibilities with global implications. As a student of architecture, I have found new and exciting ways to look at cities, and to see design as one of many actors in urban culture. It is important to keep a critical eye—as students we are taught not simply to be designers, but to constantly think, see, and draw analytically. And, of course, to perpetuate the critical discourse.
