VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages
Abstract
Cities embody societies’ conceptual, cultural, and intellectual enterprise. Through the instrumentality of its built fabric, the city expresses an implied projection of formal and structural determinants, but is, as well, a register of cultural, religious and ideological stimuli. Urban architecture is both a critical appraisal and cognitive reflection of these values. Urban processes are the primary mechanism for transmission of patterns of social and political plurality. The research is explored through the discourse of urban emulation and restatement in urban form as a trope for generative urbanism in colonial cities and their legacy in catalysing resilient urban structures, nodal suburbs. It is arguably, a planning instrument in itself and underpinned by an archetypal, encyclopaedic urbanism. Urban Emulation is projective in examining a strategy in urban design that can be applied in future settings. It involves the wholesale emulation of part or the essence of a given city in extending or intervening in another city. Emulations of urban form are processes and procedures through which urban architecture is generated and critiqued. Analogues and urban emulation are prescribed as a possible mechanism and trope for generative cities. Urban emulation explores phenomena by which specific building forms, collectives or city fabric, observed in a particular place or era, are transposed elsewhere and / or arise, often anachronistically. The research invokes historical, canonical and contemporary precedent, as well as design speculation forming an architectural and urban analysis of the role of social critique and aspirations as catalysts for the design of cities and simultaneously the manner in which cities and their architecture have been an ideological armature and apparatus for social change and urban resilience.
Ian Nazareth is an architect, researcher and educator. Ian is the director of TRAFFIC – a design and research practice working across architecture, urbanism and computation, co-director of the Urban Futures Office (UFO) and an academic at the School of Architecture and Urban Design, RMIT University Melbourne. He also contributes extensively to architectural media and critical design discourse internationally and is the editor of the forthcoming volume of The Practice of Spatial Thinking (ACTAR, 2023).
Conrad Hamann is Associate Professor of Architectural History in the School of Architecture and Urban Design, RMIT University, Melbourne. Earlier, he studied Architectural History at Columbia University and then Yale University on a Harkness Fellowship. At RMIT Architecture Dr Hamann lecturers in Australian Architecture, Twentieth Century Architecture and in the Master of Urban Design where he teaches general history on Urban form. Dr Hamann is perhaps most well-known for his book, Cities of Hope (Oxford, 1993; revised and expanded for Thames and Hudson, 2012). Along with Professor Philip Goad and Professor Geoffrey London, he recently completed An Unfinished Experiment in Living: Australian Architects and the Detached House, 1950 – 1965, for the University of Western Australia Press and is currently completing a book on Gregory Burgess’ architecture since 1968 and a second book on the engineer Bill Irwin, both for URO Publishing.