After successful completion of the course, students are able to develop architectural solution strategies that take into account the complexity of building in existing urban spaces. They will be able to form a design synthesis of the complex requirements of urban space, urban open space, the existing transportation infrastructure and structural sustainability.
Through independent research, students can architecturally record existing urban and building structures, present them in planning and analysis models and develop conceptual spatial solutions on this basis. They are able to understand the interrelationship between urban fabric, empty space and transportation infrastructure as well as its transformation through documentary analyses.
Students are able to create concepts and design projects in plan, image, model and text on the basis of their own research, and to locate, discuss and present them in the specialist discourse.

The Wien Favoriten roundabout stands for the planning ideal of the car-friendly city of the 1950s to the 1970s. The aim is to transform the built infrastructure into an urban space that repairs the break in the urban fabric. The starting point for the research-based design is the typology of the building ensemble and its potential for the city of tomorrow. Each participant designs an urban building in dialogue with the ensemble neighbours and the common outdoor space.
 
CITY REPAIR
The sustainable further development of the existing city for future urban use includes, among other things, the situational repair of grown structures. Places outside of everyday attention can become potential locations for the city of tomorrow by converting and interweaving existing urban morphologies. A new perspective on the existing creates models for new forms of the 21st century city.
As a method of urban repair, the typology of the building ensemble is to be investigated in a design-oriented manner. Three individual houses, related to each other as a small group, form each a building ensemble. The buildings open up exterior spaces In their interspaces that turn from being a background to becoming a spatial figure themselves. As social living rooms and spaces for public life, these publicly accessible street and square spaces are reinterpreted, played with and used by different generations.
The dense European city creates an exciting relationship between buildings and urban outdoor spaces with the help of building elements such as walls, windows and entrances as thresholds between inside and outside, as well as with carefully designed surfaces between the buildings. Two elements deserve special attention when designing a building ensemble: The first element is the space-creating façade in its ambiguity of content: as a climate-regulating shell and threshold, as a mediator between public and private space, as an expression of a building structure. The second element is the urban open space: determined by surface materiality, topography and planting. The research-based design examines the careful relationship between buildings and open spaces as the key to the transformation to a climate-resilient and user-oriented city.
 
CASE STUDY: ROUNDABOUT FAVORITEN
The Vienna Favoriten roundabout was opened in December 1970 as part of the first construction phase of the south-east bypass. As the second largest traffic circle in Vienna, it stands for the planning ideal of the car-friendly city of the 1950s to the 1970s. The onset of individual mass motorization changed the amount of space taken up by the transport infrastructure in the city. In the course of optimizing traffic flows, the tension between buildings and facades and the space in between was dissolved in favour of the road surface.
A barrier and border in the urban space was created at Am Alten Landgut, forming an empty center between the districts of Favoriten and Oberlaa. The district's internal, linear development axis, Favoritenstraße, crosses the open space of Reumannplatz and runs into the empty space above the Südosttangente (south-east bypass). The approximately 40-hectare circular area above the subway line and the Südosttangente is located between quarters of different  urban morphological typologies: Wilhelminian-style block edge buildings from the end of the 19th century, open linear developments from the post-war period, single-family house structures and large-scale solitary developments such as the educational campus of the Vienna University of Applied Sciences (FH Wien) as well as leisure and sports areas of the FK Austria Wien soccer stadium and the Laaerbergbad. 
The aim is to transform the built infrastructure into an urban space ‒ the empty space of the traffic island is to become a city. The break in the urban fabric caused by traffic needs is to be repaired, the separated parts of the district need a new kind of urban morphological network.

video 

Based on the strategy of a repairing transformation of the urban spatial situation, the open space potential of the existing is examined and placed in the context of the question of consumption-free public space for all and the future requirements of the city's climate resilience. The concept development is based on a precise urban morphological analysis of the existing situation as well as reading and describing the significant elements and traces in the urban space.
The elaboration of an action-oriented documentation on a new practice of dealing with the urban space and the existing traffic infrastructure and on sustainable repair strategies in the existing urban space.
The approach to the existing surrounding urban space and its spatial sequences of outdoor space, infrastructure and buildings as well as between public and private spaces is based on concept and working models. The investigation of the urban planning interfaces and the limiting facades is carried out in an equivalent manner.
The transformation of the empty space in the urban area is based on seven building plots, each with three buildings, which form building ensembles among themselves and are in a field of tension with the neighbouring building plots. An overarching, shared, car-free outdoor space forms the backbone of the networked urban island and provides a counterpoint to the fifty years of use in the context of the model of the car-friendly city.

DATES AND ATTENDANCE
Supervision appointments every Friday from 10:00 to 18:00.
Kick-off event on 1 March  from 10:00 a.m., followed by a tour of the site at 2:00 p.m.
Special dates:     
Urban planning workshop on 14 and 15.03.2024                                                                   
Concept presentation on 12.04.2024                              
Design presentation on 17.05.2024  
Final presentation on 04.07.2024 / 05.07.2024

Detailed research into urban structures and fixtures, the principles of urban repair by means of the transformation of urban space in the context of the discourse topics of climate resilience of the city and the renegotiation of land use for transport infrastructure. Evidence of the research by means of a continuously maintained logbook.
Planning, pictorial, graphic and textual implementation of a concept and design developed from this at a scale of 1:5,000 to 1:10. Site plans, floor plans, sections, views, façade sections, details, conceptual representations of principles, pictorial representations, models.