Travel Study Opportunities

• Learn how Latin American cities approach public space design and urban design/planning
• Explore Santiago, a city that has surprising similarities to Denver in terms of climate, recreation, tourism, hazards, and terrain
• Engage with urban design/planning students and faculty at the University of Chile - Santiago, our academic partner
• Experience the cuture of a city outside of the United States and how that culture is woven into the design of the city and their public spaces
• Understand how urban design, urban planning, architecture, and landscape architecture are practiced in a major Latin American capital

Public spaces are ubiquitous worldwide as a fundamental component of the urban fabric of cities. Visiting, observing, and analyzing the public spaces in cities outside of the US is critical for urban design and planning students (and practitioners) to learn how best to plan and design these critical places in communities. Santiago, as a large Latin American city, offers significant opportunities to visit and learn about public spaces. 

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• Weekly excursions include visits to Tivoli, Herculanium or Pompeii, and Orvieto
• Visit historical and modern sites, project sites, museums, interspersed with sketching
• Selected sites’ architecture and urbanism will be studied using multiple sketches with the objective to represent the site through a single architectural drawing
• Your work will culminate at the end of the trip with a presentation in Rome to be followed up with an exhibition in the fall semester

The Rome study abroad program provides necessary travel/study benefits for an education in architecture. Lessons from the culture and the city frame a more specific understanding of historical buildings in contemporary context. Daily interaction, by means of exploring, sketching, measuring and observing, is intended to strengthen both the intellectual and intuitive abilities as design tools at the core of architectural academic program. Students will complete two elective classes. These classes will take advantage of Rome as a contemporary city where historical settings and modern times represent a whole. Particular focus will be on design analysis of that relationship, the relationship between the past and that which is emerging, and how it may manifest itself between architecture (a building) and the city (group form).

The Rome program offers something unique to students and is a program that is expected of any school of architecture. It offers content and travel experience, excitement, and intellectual challenges in addition to the obvious historical significance.

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• Experience and document many of the most notable works of architecture in the world. 
• Engage with Japanese communities to explore the consequences of tectonic culture in public and domestic space. 
• Participate in joint exercises with students and faculty from Kyoto University. 
• Spend time in Tokyo, Miyajima, Naoshima, and Kyoto!

 

Across this two-and-a-half-week course, students will be immersed into the Japanese context, a building culture unlike any international peer. Through this immersion, students will embark on a series of three documentation and design prompts. These prompts, supported by tutorials, will be embedded in three disparate contexts and embedded within three distinct communities. Through these prompts, students will begin to understand the diversity of building culture within Japan.

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• Learn the interdisciplinary design principles of the Bauhaus and utilize them in a brief 3 week design charette.  
  
• Work closely with local architecture/planning firms to understand how the modernist design studio paradigm has been transformed to meet the needs of firms designing in mountain communities today.
  
• Explore the environmental and aesthetic legacy of Herbert Bayer (Designer/Artist/Environmentalist/Bauhaus Faculty member) as he played a key role in bringing the ideas of the Bauhaus to America and subsequently transformed Aspen into the global environmentally conscious urban center it is today.
• Tour historic institutions such as the Aspen music pavilion and the Resnick center to understand how a diverse and innovative design vision transformed Aspen from a historically sleepy mining town to a modern global powerhouse of arts, culture, and outdoor recreation. 
• Be exposed to the innovative planning, design, and sustainable ideas necessary to influence the creation of a culturally diverse urban center within a environmentally sensitive and beautiful mountainous landscape.

The Roaring Fork Valley Workshop is a 3-week, extended study 6 credit hours that will fulfill an ARCH or Open Elective requirement.

The cost to attend the Aspen Workshop is $4,250 + housing.*

Housing single occupancy - $1,659 (2024 costs/TBC)

Housing double occupancy - $830 (2024 costs/TBC)

Students are responsible for transportation to and from Aspen as well as meals. Housing will be at the Colorado Mountain College. 

There is a possibility to purchase a meal plan for an extra cost. 

We suggest carpooling when possible.

 

Architectural Design in the Urban Context of Rome, Italy— June 5 - July 2, 2022
Open to all CU Denver graduate students | Application deadline March 1, 2022

The Rome study abroad program provides necessary travel/study benefits for an education in architecture. Lessons from the culture and the city frame a more specific understanding of historical buildings in contemporary context. Daily interaction, by means of exploring, sketching, measuring and observing, is intended to strengthen both the intellectual and intuitive abilities as design tools at the core of architectural academic program. Students will complete two elective classes. These classes will take advantage of Rome as a contemporary city where historical settings and modern times represent a whole. Particular focus will be on design analysis of that relationship, the relationship between the past and that which is emerging, and how it may manifest itself between architecture (a building) and the city (group form).

The Rome program offers something unique to students and is a program that is expected of any school of architecture. It offers content and travel experience, excitement, and intellectual challenges in addition to the obvious historical significance.

This study abroad represents a rare and exciting opportunity for explorations of sustainable development in the energy, urban design, and governance sectors in one of the most progressive parts of the world. Copenhagen is a laboratory of visionary urbanism and Denmark's countryside, and smaller cities are stunning examples of sustainable rural life. Copenhagen's diverse approaches and innovations across the spectrum of design and planning for urban spaces include creating integrated bicycle networks, public transit, pedestrian connectivity, high quality public space, pedestrian connectivity, and design innovations. The City of Aarhus is home to some of the world's most innovative water policy and management systems. The country's clean energy, water and transportation policies and practices are admired, studied, and imitated across the globe.

Urban design and urban planning students will head to Barcelona, Spain in the summer of 2022 for an interdisciplinary studio focused on learning the principles, tools, and methodologies for planning, analyzing, and designing great urban public spaces.

The first phase of the studio focuses on public space fundamentals by exploring the history and evolution of Barcelona’s urban fabric and its numerous parks and plazas and the urban issues facing the city today; understanding the principles of public space planning and design; and learning how to design and execute public space assessments in a variety of urban contexts.

The second phase focuses on creating a public space concept plan and design for a specific site in the city’s dynamic Poblenou neighborhood, including site assessments and analyses, a public engagement pop-up event, engaging with local design and planning practitioners, and an iterative process to produce a public space and urban design concept plan for a locally based client.

Master of Urban and Regional Planning program

Instructor: Korkut Onaran

In the summer of 2019, Planning Project Studio students traveled to Dillon, Colorado to focus on reimagining Dillon's downtown core and working towards diversity and self-sufficiency in the community. As part of the initial work, students revisited Summit County’s planning agenda and reviewed the potential role of Dillon in the area’s economy in relation with surrounding towns, including Frisco, Breckenridge, and Silverthorne. Some of the key challenges identified by the students were Dillon’s seasonality and dependence on summer tourism, its shortage of workforce housing, the fact that it is relatively unknown even to Colorado residents, and the town’s lack of a distinct public realm. As part of the studio, students provided a vision for the future of Dillon and laid out key goals for the city to pursue, including diversifying the local economy, creating a more self-sufficient economy, increasing workforce housing, and working towards more equitable income distribution. The class also identified target areas and industries for the town to focus on such as tech and small businesses, arts/culture/music, the outdoor industry, and culinary enterprises.

Master of Urban and Regional Planning program

Instructor: Ryan Sotirakis

In the summer of 2019, Planning Project Studio students undertook a multi-faceted project in Leadville, Colorado the highest town in North America. After an initial “first impressions” site visit, students researched the community’s recent planning efforts, demographics, land uses, and development history. Early meetings with Leadville’s town and county planners, economic development officials, elected officials, and affordable housing groups helped define the scope of the studio project. Some of the key challenges identified by the students and the client were Leadville’s serious affordable housing shortage, lack of safe and convenient bicycle and pedestrian routes through town, and a general lack of policy consistency and funding availability for housing and infrastructure projects. Building on previous efforts by several MURP Capstone projects, students provided a vision for the future of Leadville and laid out key goals for the city to pursue, including the design of a new mixed-income residential community, town-wide redevelopment and infill design guidelines, policy recommendations for economic development, housing creation and transportation goals, and creation of a cohesive network of non-automobile mobility throughout town and connecting to the larger regional trail system.

Master of Urban Design program

Master of Urban and Regional Planning program

Instructors: Jeremy Németh, Ken Schroeppel

Urban design and urban planning students engaged in an intensive 25-day program studying "Streets as Public Spaces" in Barcelona, Spain during Summer 2018. Streets traditionally had three main functions: as routes for mobility, as public gathering spaces, and as building frontages, but these functions have become separated throughout the course of the 20th century in many cities worldwide. However, due to various political, cultural, and economic reasons, Barcelona has managed to preserve the harmony among the three functions in many of their streets, resulting in an urban fabric that is the envy of the world. In the first phase of the studio, students learned the principles of public space design and then used this knowledge to conduct public space assessments of various site in Barcelona. The second phase of the Barcelona studio gave students the opportunity to use the public space analysis and design concepts and methodologies gained in the first phase on a real site in Barcelona—the historic Can Ricart site in the Poblenou neighborhood. Working in interdisciplinary teams, the students prepared three urban design visions that reimagined the public realm in the Can Ricart site and surrounding blocks.

 

Master of Urban Design program

Master of Urban and Regional Planning program

Instructors: Jeremy Németh, Ken Schroeppel

Urban design and urban planning students engaged in an intensive 24-day program in Barcelona, Spain during Summer 2019 that focused on the revitalization of underperforming public spaces. As cities worldwide continue to urbanize, having great public spaces available to all citizens is critical. However, some public spaces aren’t successful for various reasons, so urban designers and planners must facilitate the revitalization of these important community places. In the studio’s first phase, students learned the principles of public space design and used that knowledge to develop and conduct public space assessment methodologies at various sites in Barcelona. The second phase consisted of the preparation of a Revitalization Plan for Park del Centre del Poblenou, an underutilized park that is physically and psychologically isolated from its dynamic surrounding neighborhood, a historically industrial area that is transforming into a more dense and diverse urban area. The students’ recommendations for revitalizing the park were given to a local neighborhood advocacy organization, the studio client, to help them as they work with the city to redesign and revitalize one of their most prominent neighborhood parks.

 

This Immersive Semester represented a rare and exciting opportunity for in-depth explorations of urban space and design in one of the most hurricane-ravaged areas of the United States. In this immersive semester, we investigated and observed San Juan, Ponce, and other coastal communities up close to explore human settlement and investigate how different approaches and responses to climatic and geographic conditions, public space, the layout and organization of the communities, and the island’s infrastructural systems contribute to livability. Puerto Rico has a varied and rich history and is a place with many significant challenges. These challenges include food insecurity, mounting debt, and a declining population. Hurricane Maria highlighted almost all of the issues and has opened the door for meaningful change to occur and help Puerto Rico move into a prosperous, sustainable and equitable future. As future landscape architects, we are tasked to change the places people live in, co-evolved with and are an inseparable part of. Understanding those places in-depth, their stories and histories, and their physical and cultural contexts is a central and critical requirement if we want to make meaningful change – in practical as well as in ethical terms.

 

 

The studio focused on sustainable tourism planning, the study and practice of reducing environmental and social impacts of tourism, while achieving benefits for both the place and tourists. Sustainable tourism planning involves research on impacts from touristic activities; development of business practices to minimize and mitigate negative impacts; creation of financial sources to support environmental management and preservation; inclusion of all stakeholders; and a long-term vision for sustaining people and place. The course began with a traveling orientation and comparison of three tourist locations; Athens, Naxos, and Santorini, during which students employed systematic observations of street life, creative writing, and sketching to digest what they experienced. The studio then located to the study area, the beach town of Nea Kydonia near Chania, Crete. For two weeks, students analyzed quantitative data from local and national governments, collected additional mixed-methods data through interviews, primary data collection on housing, businesses, and transportation infrastructure, and participant observation, and met daily to report and brainstorm on the economic, social, and environmental future of the area in order to develop their recommendations. The studio presented their preliminary findings and recommendations to the municipality and community and used the discussion and feedback to guide the final report.