Street Tango in Buenos Aires

University of Cincinnati Campus - Cincinnati, OH

After thinking about this project for a while, I realized this blog had no other way to get built but one step at a time. Looking from this angle, the departure point is not that important – the steady rhythm of steps is.
The University of Cincinnati campus is as good a place to start as any other. Since I’ve just returned from there with a batch of fresh photos, this will be the first post.

First, a few words about it. In a post-industrial, mid-western struggling city, the UC campus is among the few oases of cosmopolite and progressive vibe where one can escape the neglected car-compliant surroundings. This distinction owes much to the university’s policies and effort to bring in a mottled international crowd and offer exquisite facilities. What we are going to look at is the masterplan that equaled the physical appearance of the university campus to its intellectual ambitions.

The UC masterplan by Hargreaves Associates streamed billions of dollars over a 15-20 year period into the transformation of a collection of non-descript buildings into an integrated, hip looking collection of signature architecture and landscape design, well functioning live-study-work-and-play environment.

In 2006, when one of the last masterplan components, the Main Street, was completed with a Thom Mayne designed Recreation Center, the university organized "A Symposium on the Importance of Place", with Glen Allen (Hargreaves Associates), Frances Halsband (R.M. Kliment & Frances Halsband Architects), Thom Mayne (Morphosis), and Buzz Yudell (Moore Ruble Yudell Architects and Planners) – all involved with the design of various pieces of the Campus.

A few students from the Design, Architecture, Art and Planning College (DAAP) were invited to deliver the discussion points, and we did so through a glorifying powerpoint, a critical short movie, and engaging art performances… Since those are too big to upload and it may take a while to shrink them, here's a CET video that offers a good virtual tour of the campus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uItNFaYYJ84

• Read more:
  http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1870&context=ced/places http://www.recmanagement.com/200705aw1j.php http://www.gwathmey-siegel.com/images/news/pressclip/199906_pc02.pdf
  http://www.helium.com/items/1403275-famous-architecture-at-university-of-cincinnati http://morphopedia.com/projects/university-of-cincinnati-campus-recreati http://www.chroniclebooks.com/index/main,book-info/store,books/products_id,2185/path,1-11-75/title,The-Campus-Guide-University-of-Cincinnati/