WHERE AND WHEN

The course is part of the UPM Summer School and will be taught at the School of Architecture of Madrid ETSAM between June 17 and July 5, 2019.

The postal address of the School is:
Avda. Juan de Herrera, 4
Ciudad Universitaria
28040 Madrid - Spain - European Union

The course will be taught in the morning from Monday to Thursday. Visits or group meetings can be scheduled some afternoons. During the weekends and some afternoons the UPM Summer School will offer cultural activities to the students.

Web site of the University:
www.upm.es

CREDIT HOURS AND LANGUAGES

Credit hours:

48 hours of class plus around 27+ hours of cultural activities.
Certification will be provided.
The eventual number of accepted credits or credits by validation depends on the home university.

Languages:

The course will be taught in Spanish and English.
All instructors speak at least Spanish and English and, as part of the DPA and ETSAM policies, English language will be welcome in all crits, reviews, juries and discussions.

MADRID INTERCULTURAL 2019 DESCRIPTION (PDF)

The description for Madrid Intercultural 2019 Summer Course is already released. We will be posting on here the last updated version of the PDF:

HYPER PUBLIC: THE TOPIC FOR MADRID INTERCULTURAL 2019

The scale of the city is unstable. The human scale is unstable too. Our actions, implications and relationships go from the most intimate and limited to the social interconnection and, sometimes, to the physically and digitally massive connection with other people.

The structure of the city suffers those same impulses. The form that serves, sometimes with difficulty, to the habitual functioning of the users of the city, must, suddenly and due to very different reasons, multiply its density, maximize its capacity. On the one hand, the scale of the city is transformed, it is much larger because it gives service to many more people, and simultaneously much smaller because the space available to each person ―their fragment of city― seems much smaller. On the other hand, the public nature of the city is triggered, the dimension of the hyper-public appears.

The history of architecture has addressed this problem. The successive enlargements made in the Hollywood Bowl of Los Angeles since 1922 or the interventions made in Chicago's Millennium Park since 2004 are examples of this tradition in the American city. The paradigmatic Convention Hall project designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1953-54 or the roof for Festival Plaza by Kenzo Tange and Taro Okamoto in Osaka World Expo 1970 exemplify the interest of modern masters in these places of public hyper-densification.

The moments when the city becomes hyperpublic are not just affecting urban planning. On the contrary, overcrowding is an exceptional circumstance for the understanding of the person, the community, coexistence, social inclusion, and also for creativity, communication, celebration and, of course, the radical effect of the current connectivity.

The European city receives these impacts with much more difficulty although, nevertheless, it must experience them frequently. Also in Europe, architecture have to respond to the super-busyness of the city, architecture have to face the challenge of their hyper-public significance and action.


Image: Taro Okamoto, The Tower of Sun, and Kenzo Tange, Festival Plaza, Osaka, 1970, Osaka 70 World Fair.