After seemingly endless growth and prosperity established through exploitative models of tourism, today’s shores of lake Wörthersee, Kärnten are characterised by a cacophony of gated private residences and empty tourist resorts. Our current global pandemic has finally exposed the fragility and destructive impact of such models on our planet, forcing tourism industries worldwide to reassess its core values. In light of a post-pandemic recovery phase, how can these industries prevent simply going back to ‘normal’, a condition which has put us into our current situation in the first place? Could tourism re-frame its role and modes of operation in everyday life by pursuing a transition from destructive towards regenerative practices?
‘Wiener Sängerknaben’ Campus in Sekirn remains one of the last semi-public plots with direct access to the lake. Even prior the pandemic, its management has initiated the process of developing a responsible tourism strategy for the campus, capable of hosting principal activities of the choir during summers as well as expanding its agency to a regional, cross-disciplinary and trans-seasonal cultural campus of the 21st century.
Using the campus as a testing ground for future tourism prototypes, the design studio will take on the task of its development by operating within the framework of nanotourism - a creative critique to the current environmental, social and economic downsides of conventional tourism, advocating for bottom-up, participatory and locally oriented alternatives. It will speculate on the wider potentials and contribution of ‘culture in residency’ as a way of facilitating meaningful interactions and deepening our relationships with place through time.
Kärnten, a region rich in culture, craft and knowledge of wood, offers tangible opportunities to engage with this resource as a primary building material as well as address its wider role and entangled relationship with the territory. As Paola Antonelli states:
“Whether it focuses on social justice and fair trade, sustainability in the form of embodied energy or carbon sequestering, a deeper understanding of geopolitical systems, or about material culture, awareness of natural patrimony, connectedness to nature and to Earth, interspecies co-creation and co-existence, wood is where it’s at.”
Through a series of systematic research tasks, analysing strategic, material and contextual references, the course will propose a series of holistic design strategies and site-specific interventions, contributing to a timely discourse on the future of tourism development and innovation by design.
—
1 Paola Antonelli, Design and the Politics of Wood, Formafantasma Cambio, Serpentine Galleries, Koenig Books 2020
Course presentation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yV27udHhjg
Course data:
- applications only with portfolio via TISS
- intro meeting Thursday, 04.03.2021, 18:00 via Zoom
- site excursion Saturday, 20.03.2021 (2 ECTS)
- weekly meetings Thursdays 15:00 - 19:00, hybrid format
- course can be done in English and/or German
- final presentations @ Sekirn 11.06.2021, part of Architekturtage Österreich 2021 public programme
- exhibition @ Architekturhaus Kärnten in September 2021, part of Baukulturjahr Kärnten 2021 public programme
*Course is organised in collaboration with Volker Dienst and architektur in progress: https://www.architektur-inprogress.at/home.html
