the network architecture lab @
the columbia university
graduate school of architecture, preservation and planning

Network City

“Cities are communications systems.” – Ronald Abler

Network City explores how key urban areas have developed as ecosystems of competing networks. Networks of capital, transportation infrastructures, and telecommunications systems have simultaneously centralized cities while dispersing them into larger posturban fields such as the Northeastern seaboard or Southern California. Linked together through networks, such cities form the core of global capital, producing the geography of flows that structures economies and societies today.

But networks, infrastructures, and property values are the products of historical development. To this end, the course surveys the development of urbanization since the emergence of the modern network city while also focusing on conditions in contemporary urbanism.

A fundamental thesis of the course is that buildings too, function as networks. We will consider the demands of cities and economies together with technological and social networks on program, envelope, and plan, particularly in the office building, the site of consumption, and the individual dwelling unit. In addition we will look at the fraught relationship between signature architecture (the so-called Bilbao-effect) and the post-Fordist city.

Throughout the course, we will explore the growth of both city and suburbia (and more recently postsuburbia and exurbia) not as separate and opposed phenomena but rather as intrinsically related. Although the material in the course is applicable globally, our focus will be on the development of the American city, in particular, New York, Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles.

Syllabus 2008

[SCI_Arc]

Student Work, 2000