After successful completion of the course, students are able to...
To recognize the potentials and complexity of the built environment, to derive guiding planning questions from it and to answer these questions through the specific formulation of a conceptual urban, architectural design. Urban and spatial production is to be experienced as a holistic, transdisciplinary examination on the basis of a design-oriented task. Architecture and urban planning should be understood as a cultural practice with social relevance and as a design challenge including its social, economic, ecological and process-related implications. The teaching of adequate methods of analysis, design and representation and the introduction to relevant discourses are an essential part of the course.
The course will offer cross-over workshops with the course: Co-existence: Wilhelmsburg, Between Production and Vacany to provide students with the opportunity to comparatively analyze and explore similar phenomena at different scales.
Industrial region in transition
The architectural evidence of Europe's industrialization, from railroad viaducts to factories, is vast and often spectacular. They shaped entire regions and were the origin of city foundations and population growth. Historically built with a representative character, today's industrial buildings and business parks mostly follow economic-technical requirements and global supply chains.
In the spatially and functionally fragmented settlement structures of old town centers and settlement sprawl, modern industrial sites therefore usually lack a design claim and lack attention to the built context but also to the landscape.In particular, the effects of social change in recent decades in the form of migration of manufacturing industries to surrounding countries and abroad, environmental pollution and social conflicts (migration, aging) pose major challenges, especially to rural industrial regions.
Traisental / Wilhelmsburg
River, hills, forests, small towns and industry - Based on hydroelectric power, the villages along the Traisen River developed into a significant industrial region with numerous internationally renowned companies. A fragmented, strongly industrial urban fabric developed from the Danube to Türnitz, which, in spite of the quality natural spaces, predominantly turns away from the Traisen and the valley landscape. Furthermore, the (post-) productive areas and buildings hardly form synergies with each other, as well as with the landscape and urban space. Instead, they fragment the valley, creating a wide variety of partial and residual spaces whose understanding as a resource has only recently gained relevance.
In particular, the closure of the production site of the sanitary ceramics manufacturer LAUFEN in Wilhelmsburg - the starting point of this design - exemplifies the spatial and social effects of a monofunctional orientation of the economy for a small town. Nevertheless, the revitalization and reintegration of existing structures into the local context offer enormous development potential. Transforming them into attractive and adaptive spaces that enable, even initiate, contemporary uses and allow for interlocking and overlapping with adjacent settlement and open spaces will be a defining content of the course.
Design will embark on a search for the inherent potentials between historic industrial heritage and future-oriented living space. In the course of the semester, strategies will be developed as to how a co-existence of production, natural, cultural and urban landscape in the Traisen Valley is possible.
Weekly corrections, workshops, interim presentations, final submission. The proof of performance is immanent. I.e. both the cooperation during all course units at the TU, as well as the continuous work between these units, as well as the quality of these and the final delivery are used to determine the grade.
