After successful completion of the course, students are able to develope a method for distilling local charateristics of a place in order to reproduce it without creating its copy. This method should serve communities, villages or cities, which have been largely destroyed or are facing a disaster, to find a way of reconstruction which enables their inhabitants to continue their way of life as much as possible.
Pompeji 79, Messina 1908, Avezzano 1915, Irpinia 1980, L’Aquila 2009, Amatrice 2016 – sites of great natural disasters in Italy, which took many people's life and destroyed villages and cities. Italy's history has been written by these incidents as much as by the following reconstructions.
One of the most recent and still ongoing reconstructions is taking place in L'Aquila: The inhabitants were provided with new housing outside the city in New Towns within a short period of time. At the same time the old town - centre of public life - was declared as a prohibited area for many years. No alternative space was offered for keeping up public everyday life, social networks or local economies. At the same time numerous historical buildings in L'Aquila have been reconstructed in an earthquake-proof way with the help of newest technologies, turning L'Aquila into a show case of a Smart City. However, the question who is going to live here is not clearly answered.
Task
After disasters like earthquakes it is necessary to act for the short-term and think for the long-term. In order to be able to quickly make right decisions it is necessary to be well prepared. Documents like the "The Sphere Handbook" written by NGOs try to set universal standards for emergency relief. At the same time they point out that it is important to react on local specificities. But how can the universal become specific?
This Entwerfen poses this question and is looking for ways, how to identify local characteristics of a place, how to survey and reproduce them without creating a copy of it. How can reconstruction become more than the necessary provision of basic housing space and make sure that inhabitants can keep up their social networks and continue maintaining their local everyday life, customes and traditions? We are going to describe the elements of a place and neighbourhood systematically and are going to translate these into an imagined reconstruction.
This Entwerfen focusses on questions as what are the characteristics of a place and its everyday life? how can we find and survey these? is it possible to reproduce them? How is it possible that something that has developed bottom-up over years can be reproduced by top-down planning? Depending on if the places of our interest are going to be visited by you or not the method of working will start either with a field- oder a deskstudy. A large part of this term will be spent on understanding a place how it works and what its characteristics are. Drawing will be the most important tool since it is a way to analyse situations, to test ideas, to gain knowledge, to design and to communicate ideas.
This Entwerfen will leave you much feedom in finding your individual questions. However, what we are looking for is a prototypical design of a reconstruction. It can be done for a concrete place or can be as systematic as it can be applied to various situations. The scale of our observations and projections ranges from the flat to the city.
Exkursion (optional)
Die Exkursion führt uns nach Rom, Neapel und die Region L’Aquila. Die Teilnahme an der Reise ist optional. Das heißt, Studierende können an diesem Entwerfen auch teilnehmen, ohne mitzufahren. Die Anmeldung zum Entwerfen mit Exkursion erfolgte bis 10. Juli, Entwerfen ohne Exkursion über Pool-Anmeldung im Herbst.
Termine: Jeden Montag um 09:00 im Projektraum Wohnbau
