Critics – ARPL3003
General comments – Émilie
Presentation
When a presentation is limited in time, students really
need to prepare and practice, otherwise it shows immediately. A lot of students
couldn’t finish, and in some case we couldn’t even get to the main idea of the
presentation.
In most of the cases, there were too many pictures or
images in each slide, which I find distracting. Also, students should be
careful with small images and small fonts –it was sometimes very difficult to
read, even from the 1st row. Is it always good to make a test before the
presentation, even if it’s only with 1 or 2 slides.
Student should think about the right type of drawing
for the idea they want to share. For example, sections are very useful (and
were underused) to understand relations between different spaces, proportions,
etc.
Students could think of visual “tools” that would help
the audience to situate the places/spaces mentioned in the presentation,
especially when time is limited (a small plan of the journey indicating the
specific place described, in the corner of the slide, for example).
Simple pictures (or photoshoped versions with a simple
“drawing” filter) are useful for descriptions or to support an analysis – but in
my opinion they can’t be used as the main visual tool to present an analysis.
Drawings made over a picture and other drawings or diagrams are usually more
effective: they help to highlight a specific aspect or idea about the
place/space mentioned.
I think that this project requires students to work at
a smaller scale than they might be used to, i.e. the scale of a person / a
pedestrian. For example, if someone talks about building façades that make it uninviting
or intimidating for a pedestrian, I would expect to see drawings that show a
certain level of details; the changing surfaces of buildings, their materiality,
etc.
Besides drawing, drawing and drawing, another advice I
would give to students who want to improve the graphic quality of their presentation
is to spend some time observing and analysing projects (mostly in urban design
or architecture) that they find interesting or well presented. How did the
designer use drawings to express his ideas: use of color for specific elements,
transparency for others, lines, diagrams, etc…
Content
I was hoping for more critical observations on the
principles that students have learned in school, in comparison to the reality
they have observed in their journey. Are the width of the sidewalks and the
presence of trees always (the most relevant) elements to explain the absence of
pedestrians in the city? Is the presence of a new bus/BRT stop will
automatically improve mobility opportunities for everyone? How is it that some
things that seem to go against the principles you’ve learned in school (public
taxis for example, narrow sidewalks, informal markets or street stands) are
actually working (even if not perfectly) and are used by a lot of people? Should
we change that completely?
It was very interesting when students could identify
through their journey existing elements that can contribute to improve the
public life and use of public space, things that they will be able to build on
in the next phase of their project. I appreciate this empirical, positive, and above
all, less normative, approach to planning and design.
The best works were in my opinion the ones starting
with a clear argument / message and the presentation of different observations
or “elements of proof” to support it. No need to present every aspects of a
journey – better to concentrate on the ones that are truly relevant and useful
for the main argument.
When I said in class that I didn’t learn much about some
of the journey presented, this is what I meant. Most places were described in a
very conventional or detached way. The elements identified and presented were
the obvious ones (what I called the “recipe” for good planning: sidewalks,
trees, benches, etc…) but had no relation with the main idea / argument
presented, which was, in contrast, the students’ own way of looking at and
understanding a place. Obviously, this does not mean that sidewalks and benches
should not be considered and integrated in the next phase of the project, but
at this stage, I expected that students would go further and explore a more
personal and original angle of their space and of the city, with the
corresponding observations and drawings to support it. We had some nice example
of these angles with presentations on public arts, layers of the city, time,
and boundaries…
For the rest of the project, I would suggest that
students pay more attention to this adequacy between
the main argument / theme they are working on and the material they have
collected to do so. And I think that a theme should not be “forced” on a
specific journey/ space if the pictures, drawings and observations collected
don’t speak of it at all (for example, so far, no one working on the gender
aspect of a place really managed to present material speaking of the particular
experience of a women). Students could either go back to the site and
collect new, more relevant, material or go back to what they have already collected
and to try to see if they can draw something else from it.
