B.Arch CurriculumFree, forever
A tribute to Amogh N P
Urban Design
Architecture designs the building. Town planning draws the land-use map. Urban design works in the gap between them — it designs the space BETWEEN buildings: the street, the square, the public realm, and the three-dimensional form of the city as people actually move through, read and remember it. This course is the theory of that in-between scale: how we perceive city form (Lynch's image, Cullen's serial vision, Rossi's collective memory), what makes public space alive (Jacobs and Whyte), what goes wrong (blight, slums, sprawl), and how cities are remade (renewal, participation, transit-oriented development and conservation). Less a style than a way of seeing the city.
Course byAmogh N P· Architect & interior designer
The syllabus
5 units · 5 liveTranscribed from the official B.Arch syllabus. All 5 units are live as full interactive lessons, each with original diagrams, a self-assessment quiz and a studio task.
Unit 1 — Introduction to Urban Design
LiveWhat urban design is and how it differs from architecture and town planning — the design of the space BETWEEN buildings; the 1956 Harvard conference; perception of city form; townscape elements; figure-ground and the Nolli map; urban scale, massing and the quality of urban enclosure (the D/H ratio); behavioural issues; scope and objectives.
Unit 2 — The Role of Public Space
LivePublic space defined and typed; its evolution — the Greek agora, the Roman forum, the medieval market square, the Renaissance/Baroque piazza, and the Indian maidan, bazaar street and chowk; place-making and identity; urban morphology; the image of the city and the perception of the urban environment.
Unit 3 — Organization of Space — the Canon
LiveHow space is organized and articulated, read through the canon: Kevin Lynch's image of the city (paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks); Gordon Cullen's townscape and serial vision; Norberg-Schulz's genius loci; Aldo Rossi's collective memory and type; and the social life of streets — Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte; Edmund Bacon's movement systems.
Unit 4 — Issues in Urban Space
LiveUrban blight and obsolescence; slums and squatter settlements (the UN-Habitat five deprivations); methods of survey, data collection and presentation; the prevention and upgrading of slums (in-situ vs relocation); and contemporary approaches — the urban catalyst, the transit metropolis and urban sprawl.
Unit 5 — Urban Redevelopment
LiveObjectives and programs of urban redevelopment; redevelopment vs rehabilitation vs conservation vs renewal; public involvement and community participation (Arnstein's ladder); the privatized public realm (POPS) and the role of real estate; transit-oriented development (the 3 Ds and the ITDP principles; India's 2017 TOD policy); urban heritage conservation and sustainable design ideas.
Course outcomes
What you will be able to doExplain urban space — its formation and transformation — and where urban design sits between architecture and planning.
Describe the organization and articulation of urban spaces, including public space and its evolution.
Read the morphological and perceptual development of urban space through Lynch, Cullen, Rossi, Jacobs and Whyte.
Explain urban blight, slums and sprawl, and the importance and methods of urban renewal.
Analyse urban regeneration — participation, TOD, the privatized public realm, heritage and sustainability.
Frame design ideas for a large-scale urban renewal / public-realm project.
The author
Amogh N P
Architect, interior designer, and creative polymath. Studio Matrx began in his notebooks — his vision of design made honest, useful, and open to everyone. Its Academy is written and taught in his memory, and free, forever.
More about Amogh →Design the space between buildings.
The image of the city, the life of public space, the issues of decline, and the craft of renewal. Read the five units, study the diagrams, then test yourself.
The curriculum is free, forever