After successful completion of the course, students are able to productively make use of the concept of the 2000-Watt society for new ideas of cities, neighbourhoods and ways of living.
The results of this semester project are models or concrete designs of cooperative housing/living-visions for a 2000-Watt society. Students are invited to develop their own “design question” after setting up a thesis for their work at the beginning. Therefore the challenge is to find out at which point we need to intervene in Vienna in order to tackle questions of eco-social sustainability, resilience and innovation for housing.
Video: https://tube1.it.tuwien.ac.at/videos/watch/c3b66aff-2dcb-4154-b379-e767c008933d
Cooperative Housing for the 2000-Watt Society is an emerging, international network of different architecture faculties over the world. Besides the TU Wien, students at the TU Braunschweig, Carnegie Mellon University/Pittsburgh, University of Southern California and California College of the Arts are working on the same topic. We make use of our newly acquired skills of digital working and set up an arena for global exchange for a topic which is an intrinsically global one.
One of our starting points is the concept of the 2000-Watt society which was developed at the beginning of the 1990s in Switzerland and postulates that every earthling is allotted a primary energy budget of 2 kWh. The second proposal we are building on is by Hans Widmer who believes in the power of neighbourhoods and their potential for restructuring society in order to arrive at the 2000-Watt society.
Neighbourhoods, as big as the territory of a cat in a dense urban environment, that are based on concepts of sharing and cooperative ownership are the key entities for Widmer. Even though we start from the physical quantity of 2000-Watt, this Studio is not interested in punctual, technical solutions, but in broader concepts of new forms of living. We are looking for manifold ways we can meet the demands of the future.
Vienna is our testing field. Social housing here has a strong relationship to its history. We are going to start to look at this history in order to find out what early traces we can find of the aspired future. And we are going to look at a selection of concrete sites and their different frame conditions for implementing cooperative housing for the 2000-Watt society. Finally, this Studio is going to be the Viennese contribution for an international project.
Feedback and Exchange
In the course of this Entwerfen the potentials of distance-learning and digital working are going to be used for an international exchange with other universities. We are going to meet every week for either individual talks or discussions in the big group (round table). Additionally, we are going to have a discourse with our partners at the other universities. Lectures and guests both from Vienna and from abroad are going to give input for the participating students.
Work Methods
We are going to start with a critical examination of the topic and Vienna as the target and location for our experiments. We see design and research as one unity. A crucial and typically architectural method is the drawing: it allows us to see things in a new way at to create new relationships between them.
Application with Portfolio, please!
Dates:
Thursday Morning 9:00-14:00 for the time being via zoom
Fist meeting: 4.3. 9:00
Submission end of June
More detailed schedule will follow
Christina Lenart is going to be present every Thursday, Michael Obrist will join regularly.
in case of any questions: lenart@wohnbau.tuwien.ac.at
