RESEARCH IN APPLIED ARCHITECTURAL DISCIPLINES

RESEARCH IN APPLIED ARCHITECTURAL DISCIPLINES

By

RAVINDAR KUMAR

Assistant Professor

Department of Architecture and Planning

NED University of Engineering and Technology

Karachi

 

1. RESEARCH IN URBAN DESIGN:

Urban Design consists of making proposals for the form and management of extensive environments. Urban designers also find themselves responsible for carrying out the changes they propose, either directly by serving as the packager, coordinator, or manger of projects or indirectly by establishing and enforcing guidelines for them.

Urban Design is practiced by a loose cadre of professionals, some prefer to call themselves urban designers while others insist to be called architects, landscape architects or even city planners.

In regrettably smaller number of instances, urban design in initiated to improve the social construction of communities or increase.

What differentiates UD from planning, development and management its control focus on experiential and aesthetic quality of the environment.

UD is not as commonly supposal, confined to large sale projects only. The scale largely varies (with the approach off course) from metropolitan region to a single plaza.

In UD exercises there is no single client. One of the attributes is to develop a single client group for the purpose.

In majority of the cases the role of urban designer is that of an interventionist nature.

Urban designers also help shape the future by proposing new environmental arrangements that are popular and change peoples expectations.

For routine problems, there is need for research to develop and test environmental standards, and this is specially critical where the instrument of design is some public regulation. All standards are valuable but can be modified and change as per need.

A basic question here is how people structure cities in their minds, how they orient themselves in time and space, and how areas acquire particular environmental meaning.

Designers have to deal with specific form of knowledge demanding their own style of research – the possibilities of environmental form. Design research of this kind is largely speculative, the product of exscind experiments.

Knowledge about effective processes is another area of research which can be grouped in several categories – methods of analysis, proposal decafting and ways of organizing design processes in their political and institutional contrast etc.

Recent studies have revcaled that public development control and guidance systems are important in framing strategies.

In majority of the cases the apprsaithes / proposals / techniques in urban design are situation dependent.

RESEARCH, STATUS AND OPPORTUNITIES:

Spatial Dynamics:

Urban Designer is forced to draw upon a highly elective set of sources to in for the spatial consequences of demographic, social, economic and life style changes occurring in the cities.

Several phenomena have gained importance. Revitalization of inner city, back to the city monument are some examples.

Three areas deserve special attention.

Long term effect of the massive growth of communication technologies (like the industrial revolution).

Combined impact of demography, changing location preferences, changing higher real housing costs, and increased travel costs on the form and character of currently built residential areas.

Further of older industrial, and especially warehousing, districts that rim the centers of many cities.

Environmental Precedents:

Documentation of specific projects is fairly important in the practice of urban design. Each urban designers has a list of projects that according to him are worthy of documentation.

UD Standards:

The task of improving standard can be aided if researchers explicitly establish the basic norms of such condition where these norms can be applied. Public sentiment is also of great importance here.

Use, Meaning and Behavioral Aspects of Urban Environment:

Considerable literature & available on matters like social aspects of urban form, environmental cognition, the securities of urban form, perception and meaning of natural environments, activities in public spaces, environmental learning, site design, subdivision design, street design play spaces, neighborhood design etc.

For future – we need to research upon peoples attitudes and knowledge towards urban settings.

Secondly accurate protocols and time budgets of urban residents – how different acuities of different people correlate with the and space.

Urban Form Possibilities:

Different forms have been presented in different ways by the western designers. Ideal city, good city etc are certain notions existing in this regard.

How different events are going to affect the city form are yet to be studied.

Procedural Issues (Design Techniques):

The field of UD methods has continued too long to espouse the ideal of deductive rationality, assuming that the optional process of designing proceeds smoothly and irreversibly through steps of problem definition analysis, developing and testing options, choosing among these and carrying out the preferred design.

Political & Institutional Arrangements:

Public sector when design is almost inevitably a political act, one of the key research areas is the coalition – building process, which must be an integral component of any design process.

Design Guidance Systems:

One issue often missing in the research is the pattern of beneficiaries and losers of the system that enforces design intentions and the rules applied.

Broader Issues (Intellectual Origins of the Field):

- Resin the area of intellectual origins should be guided, first and last, by the strong intellectual curiosity of researchers, rather than by any calculation of immediate relevance.

Urban Planning – Evolution and Status:

Up evolved at a body of knowledge, field of study and profession during early twentieth century in US.

This was a direct outcome of the city beautiful movement of late nineteenth century to replace the sooty grimy city of industrial evolution by aesthetically pleasing, attractive and clean cities.

Political invest of 1960s in US caused the expansion of the profession.
 
REFERENCES:

1. Synder, james. C. Editor(1984) “architectural research” new york: van nostrand reinhold company ‘research for urban design, gray hack. Pp. 124-145
2. ‘Urban planning within architectural design research’ by anthony james catanese, pp. 146-160:
3. Khan ahmad nabi “multan – history and architecture” islamabad: inst. Of islamic history, culture & civilization – 1983