Throughout the history of architecture, the role of the architect has been to determine lines that ordered the world.  In the past two centuries, however, as cities have rapidly expanded into vast urban territories that are increasingly pluralistic, the ability to determine such lines has become progressively more complex and suspect.  The notion of indeterminacy within architecture and the city not only halted the project of Modernism but also spawned several trajectories of design that embraced flexible, soft, dynamic and transforming systems to respond to the new needs of the expanding city and its pluralistic inhabitants. The project of contingency embedded within these various trajectories has both plagued and resituated the role of architecture in the urban territory, but has it produced a collective, political, or legible urban realm?Charting the problems and responses of the transformation from the City to Metropolis and Public to Publics, we will track a particular lineage of architectural urbanism with its roots in the tension between the Enlightenment and Romanticism.  Each of these projects and theorists share a common purpose: instilling and injecting a new form of civic publicness. The aim of the seminar is not to disengage the Architect from an ever increasingly complex and indeterminate public realm and city, but rather to find a template to design with determinism that simultaneously responds to the diversity of the public sphere and metropolis.  Here, we can formulate a response to Aldo van Eyck’s assertion that, “If Society has no form, how can architects build its counter-form?”  Negotiating Control vs. Choice, Hard vs. Soft, Determinacy vs. Indeterminacy, Public vs. Publics and City vs. Metropolis, we will probe the dilemma and potential of the late Modern Project.

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