ARCH 5002 Architectural Design Concentration: Super Max City
The Architectural Design Concentration course emphasizes an architectural problem developed around faculty expertise and emerging opportunities in the profession. In Professor Crow’s studio, Super Max City, students investigated how architecture contributes to the political, cultural, and social formation of the contemporary city through the design and fabrication of a large and complex urban revitalization project sited at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The project incorporated three major programmatic elements: high-end residential condominiums, a modular building or building-component factory, and an experimental penitentiary. The intent of the Super Max City studio was to ask and propose critical responses to the question, “What is a city?” through the conceptualization and design of a mega-project similar in scope and sophistication to the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, New York, and the Woodwards Redevelopment project in Vancouver, British Columbia.
