Assistant Professor Clutter’s M.Arch students work featured in International Architectural Biennale, Rotterdam

Architecture Assistant Professor McLain Clutter’s winter 2010 Arch 562/UP631 studio will be included as part of the Smart Cities – Parallel Cases 2 exhibition at the 2012 International Architectural Biennale in Rotterdam (IABR). The studio’s project, titled “The (i)Deal City,” is a pragmatic and inventive renegotiation of urbanism with the city’s public and its region. Students from colleges all over the world will present their visions of ‘city-making’ in the exhibition. Clutter’s studio began with the assumption that the contemporary urban condition is too complex with too many interests at stake to entertain such fantasies.

Hence, dismissing with the Ideal City, this studio collectively designed the (i)Deal City. The studio designed the (i)Deal City on the site Round Rock, Texas, statistically the second fastest growing city in the United States in 2010 and the international corporate headquarters for Dell.

Studio participants were required to think across disciplinary boundaries in order to account for the urban challenges posed by considering Round Rock’s future.

Included in this exhibition are five projects from the 2010 M.Arch. graduates:

• “Round Rock: Garden City” by Susannah Cramer Greenbaum and Erica Wannemacher, dealing with agriculture production, where select areas of suburban residential density in Round Rock are maintained and converted into cooperative farming communities.
• “TIMBY (Trail In My Back Yard)” by Christopher Gerdes and Katie Wirtz, considers public space through a system of trails that occupy otherwise worthless land to create a network of public space that stitches Round Rock together.
• “DELL Suburbia” by Bryan Alcorn and Melinda Rouse speculates on how Dell Computer may be incentivized to become a housing developer for Round Rock.
• Round Rock: A Transit Oriented Future” by Christopher Wheeler and Michael Gradis’ project is a transit oriented development strategy based on the principal of gifting low-value property to private developers in return for transit development funding.
• “Dell Downtown,” by Lauren Shirley and Peter Spaulding, imagines a future in which Dell’s presence is leveraged to produce a material urbanism that may solicit a more diversified economy built around Dell’s economic alliances.

MArch Graduates Katie Wirtz, Melinda Rouse and Erica Wannemacher assisted in curating the studio’s work for the exhibition.

For more information on the exhibition: click here.