Master's Degree Projects

Imagining Whittier Square

Professional Project - OU Master of Urban Design

FALL 2021 - SPRING 2022

Content

The capstone course of the Master of Urban Design curricula, this course provides an opportunity for students to add to the body of professional and scholarly work with a comprehensive project of their own design. Students conduct work individually and they are responsible for identifying project goals, instituting a workflow and establishing a schedule.

Requirements

Students will meet with the instructor each week at a mutually agreed time to review the progress of their project. All students enrolled in this course will meet on selected Saturdays to present the progress of their project to their peers. The quality of each presentation will be evaluated using the rubric in this syllabus. 

After completing six credit hours of the professional project, the students defend their project before a committee of no less than three faculty members of the Graduate College. Defenses are held at the end of each semester as required.

Project Criteria

When planning and executing a professional project, students are asked to meet four criteria:

1.  The project must have significant depth and breadth to capture the interest of the student for the one-year period that is typically required to complete the project.

2.  The project must address an urban research question or urban design problem in an original way.

3.  The project must demonstrably incorporate scholarly or practical research.

4.  The project should involve or benefit the community.

(Excerpt from course syllabus)

Landscape Architecture for Urban Designers

OU Master of Urban Design Course (ARCH 5763)

FALL 2021

Instructor:  Greg Warren, PLA

Core Project:

Three Case Studies that would be combined at the end of the course to create a Master Plan for the Area Analyzed.

   1. Complete Street (North IDL Renovation)

   2. Historic Park

   3. Courtyard

​

Course Description:

The course provides a survey of the main public spaces designed by landscape architects and urban designers, primarily streets, squares and parks. Students employ functional planning, designing for people and vehicles, paving design, planting selection and design, public lighting and furniture and equipment selection. Students read comparative books and articles with exemplary spaces and produce their own case studies using photography, measured drawings, and exposition.

Expectations:

The course work is carried out by each student working individually and with shared discussion. Each student will produce three case studies, one each for a street, a square and a park. Each case study will be produced in a common portfolio format that will allow the case studies to be collected into a common work. Students will also create thirty minute presentations with accompanying PowerPoint or Prezi graphics of their case studies. Each written case study will be worth 15% of the overall course grade and each oral presentation another 15% of the overall course grade. The remaining 10% of the course grade will be based on participation in class discussions and a demonstrated grasp of the readings and lectures. Students’ case studies will be evaluated based on the quality of their research, graphic and written quality, oral presentation skills and development of critical reasoning faculties related to urban studies.

(Excerpts from Course Syllabus)

​

Chown Place Leaves the Nest

Diversifying a Senior Community

Urban Design Studio Class  - Fall 2020 / Spring 2021

Chown Place is a 5.6-acre site in Victoria, British Colombia, Canada originally founded in 1956 as affordable housing for seniors over the age of 55. At the time of this writing Chown Place has 108 units in 17 buildings. However, the City of Victoria is experiencing a housing shortage and that shortage is expected to continue. Members of the Gorge View Society, a non-profit which manages affordable senior housing in Chown Place, recognized the opportunity that Chown Place can provide for the area.

How We Got Involved

As part of the Graduate Student Urban Design Team from the University of Oklahoma’s Master’s in Urban Design offered through the Christopher Gibbs College of Architecture, we learned about this project through Dr. Kristina Leach, who resides near Chown Place and is a Director of the Gorge View Society, and an Affiliate Faculty Fellow at the Gibbs College of Architecture. It was Dr. Leach who learned of the expansion project at Chown Place and proposed it to Shawn Schaefer, Director of the Urban Design Studio at the University of Oklahoma’s Tulsa Campus.

Design Approach

Urban Design is best taught through a “service learning” approach giving hands on experience with real world projects. As each project is different, the approach must be more based in guiding principles and patterns rather than a system of steps. We used a design thinking approach adapted from the Interaction Design Foundation:
Empathize - Define - Ideate - Prototype - Test.
During both semesters we engaged the community:

 - Community Leaders and Stakeholders - Monthly meetings via Zoom

 - Experts and Special Interests - Directed interviews

 - Residents and Property Owners - Photovoice Activity

 - The Public and Outside Observers - Wix Website
https://fall2020studio.wixsite.com/chownplacedesign

The UDS team produced a final document with all the findings and project ideas for Chown Place to give to the stakeholders. The main objective for Chown Place is to create a plan for the site that contains between 300 and 400 units, incorporates a mix of housing sizes to accommodate families, and increases the number of affordable units as well as the current senior residents. For this reason, an additional 58 units in a new 4-story building is planned to begin construction this year (2021) by Number Ten Architects. One of the challenges to our project was that the planning and design of Chown Place has already begun, which necessarily influences many of the possible outcomes of our design process. We discovered many opportunities to make Chown Place special for its residents and the surrounding neighborhood. 

So far Chown Place has been considered a “nested” community within the Burnside-Gorge Neighborhood: within the community but not really a part of it. This is a situation that needs to change, and while we have specifically focused on Chown Place we have also looked for opportunities to incorporate objectives found in the Burnside-Gorge Neighborhood Plan.