Open Urban Design: An Explorative Review on Urban Design Studio

Abstract

The gap between creativity and rationality in the field of architecture and urban design in the architecture school’s studio is attempted to be explored through studio experimentation. A class experimentation entitled Open Urban Design Studio was conducted involving fifteen students of Department of Architecture Faculty of Civil Engineering and Planning, Universitas Islam Indonesia. Two questions to be explored were: is there any new thinking that arises from studio experimentation in interpreting open urban design? What is the role of learning in the context of open urban design? The experimentation showed that open urban design may be a new concept to open a broader understanding of urban design. It is able to reach the concept of openness, starting from the physics (open building), the design process (open design), to democratic aspirations (open city). Students' works show there are three genres in open urban design to propose, namely: (1) Urban invitation that gives opportunity for the society to build narration; (2) Urban frame that diminishes the barrier between architecture and infrastructure to create new variations of life-settings; and (3) Urban parts that forms a codified urban element allowing the citizens to plug in the city system.