After successful completion of the course, students are able to develop structurally and physically functioning construction elements that question standardised building methods in current building practice by means of innovative solutions. They will be able to relate material-related preconditions to spatial principles and formulate them in technical-constructive details. In the process, they will be able to relate construction methods of different building materials directly to their ecological aspects and to examine and compare these in a holistic observation of the energy efficiency (CO2-balance, embodied energy, storage capacity, resilience, etc.). Through independent research, the students can establish interrelationships between the individual construction elements and the urban planning body and to understand them through documentary analyses of the individual city building blocks. They are able to grasp existing structures architecturally and in terms of planning and to present comprehensively design and concept theses in plans, images and text. 

Design Studio Urban Monolith – the Archetypical Monolithic Wall

With the oil crises of the 1970s, a rethinking began in the building industry. Since then, the layered construction of exterior walls has been used with the aim of larger energy efficiency, in order to meet the increasing legal requirements of insulation and at the same time to optimise the economically usable floor space through slimline walls. The mantra of layering – load-bearing wall, thermal protection, sealing – in the form of highly specialised building materials thus dominates today’s building practice and has reduced the ecological question largely to an abstract coefficient of thermal conductivity.    

However, since the 1990s, the subject of massiveness has increasingly been rediscovered in the building industry. In contrast to the high-tech layering of heterogeneous building materials, a new discussion is developing around simple building with homogenous material that simultaneously supports and in the best case insulates: the archetypical monolithic wall. Buildings made of one material, of wood, stone, concrete, brick, clay or recently also of glass, are increasingly finding their way into contemporary construction.    

The design studio Urban Monolith analyses these methods of solving problems of homogenous construction from the scratch and develops new approaches to monolithic construction by questioning common building physics, building law and architectural specifications. In the process, constructional as well as material-related and atmospheric aspects are related to spatial problems of massive building and reflected on the architectural space and the city morphology beyond the building component.      

The basis is to observe the massiveness of the main building as figure in the surrounding space of the city. Even since the Cinquecento these considerations have been the basis of a spatial discussion that affects the development of the European city. Beyond the constructive, the building complex is addressed as massive presence in the city, as Urban Monolith, and at the same time the urban space is read as positive figure in the building mass, as city morphology. 

The course is scheduled as part of a research project on monolithic construction, planned for several terms. In a first step, in the winter term 2020/21 the focus is thus on monolithic building methods in wood and concrete. The analyses thus always take place in an interchange between structural-physical details and urban morphological analysis. 

In the first stage, with the aid of discussions, research and keynote lectures the basics of monolithic building construction will be brought together and further analysed following constructive-spatial categories. In the process, the topics of to form, to join, to order and to use/inhabit will be dealt with and spatially formulated. 

These analyses will be contrasted with research on the city. On the basis of theoretical works such as Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960), Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), Aldo Rossi’s Architettura della Città (1966), Colin Rowe’s and Fred Koetter’s Collage City (1978) and Oswald Mathias Unger’s Thematisierung der Architektur (1983), morphological city analyses will be carried out in Vienna.by means of city walks, research, sketch-like and planning documentation. 

Based on the research, building elements will then be formulated that, independently of a specific location, address a possible construction principle and a transition, a threshold (interior – exterior, foundation-wall-ceiling, etc.). The previously analysed groups of topics are to be combined into summary in one element. At the same time, the urban analyses result in research into specific selected urban situations and their spatial sequences.

These are analysed in their interaction with the surroundings and with regard to spatial principles and documented by way of plans and models. Urban principles are filtered out and are formulated in an urban building block independent of the location. 

In the final step, all research and formulations, both in detail as well as in the urban scale, are brought together in a written architectural concept thesis (spatial manifesto). This anticipates a specific design and can be represented in various forms such as an essay, a thesis paper, a concept description, a parable etc., each with a graphic part and with text.

The course is carried out with the participation of experts across institutes and external offices. These lecturers are Arch. DI Sven Matt and DI Simon Moosbrugger from Innauer Matt Architects, Bezau as well as DI Günter Meusburger (engineering office for building physics, Schwarzenberg), Prof. DI Peter Bauer and DI Dr. Kamyar Tavoussi (ITI, Vienna University of Technology).

Because of the current situation and the regulatory preconditions with respect to the Corona-Virus (COVID-19) the studio will mostly be organised digitally in distance learning via ZOOM. Individual, selected dates are expected to take place as presence dates in the university premises under compliance with the prescribed security measures.

Detailed planning, diagrammatic and systematic representations of a building element on a scale of 1:20 to 1:1. Façade sections, details, axonometries, spatial and constructive representation of principles, models.

Planning documentation of a city building block and the appropriate city sequence on a scale of 1:1000 to 1:100. Layout plans, Nolli maps, floor plans, sections, spatial representations of principles, models

Written and visual concept thesis