After successful completion of the course, students are able to develop architectural solutions in their complexity of spatial, constructive, physical and atmospheric conditions. They can relate material-related specifications to spatial principles and formulate these in technical-constructive details and spatial-architectural principles. They learn from the nature of the city.
Through independent research, students can also record existing structures in architectural and planning terms and use these as a basis for developing conceptual and spatial solutions. They can establish interrelationships between the constructive detail and the individual building, as well as the urban and landscape spatial body, and comprehend them through documentary analyses.
Based on their own research and concepts, they are able to create, discuss and comprehensively present design projects in plan, image, model and text.
The course will be held bilingual in German and English.
STADTFRIEDHOF
In his 1966 radio lecture The Heterotopias, Michel Foucault describes the cemetery as the “absolutely other place”, a mythical place that is alienated from everyday life but, contrary to the notion of mental, dream-like utopias, forms a real, physically and temporally tangible space.
The cemetery did not always have this attribution of meaning in Western civilisation. In the Roman Empire, burials took place on the periphery of towns, in linear formations along the entrance roads. With Christianisation in Europe, the churchyard began to establish itself as a consecrated burial place in the immediate vicinity of the church in village and town centres. In this way, believers were able to have a place of rest in the vicinity of their venerated saints and relics. In contrast to today, the ritual of burial was not a festive but a pragmatic activity, collective mass graves were not uncommon and death as part of everyday village and urban life was an omnipresent event.
It was not until the beginning of the Enlightenment that burial grounds were dissolved and relocated from the city centres to the suburban periphery as a hygienic measure. The first central urban cemeteries were built, separating the place of the dead from the everyday life of the living in the city. These landscaped sites were the predecessors of the “park cemeteries” of the 20th century.
The planning of a city cemetery in St. Marx is intended to critically question the outsourcing of burial and commemoration from the city and the tabooing of death from everyday life. The building of a new multi-denominational burial site in interaction with functional spaces of everyday urban life is to open up new approaches to a contemporary, inner-city resting place.
SANKT MARX
In the course of the relocation of inner-city cemeteries in Vienna initiated by Joseph II, the Biedermeier cemetery of St. Marx was laid out in 1784 in the vicinity of a citizens' hospital directly on the Linienwall. A rational structure of leafy paths and graves defines this design.
Wedged in by the Landstraßer Gürtel, a suburban railway line along the Rennweg and an overpass of the Südosttangente, the formerly important goods traffic point now forms a special urban situation. Residential and leisure facilities meet the now overgrown cemetery, which has been used as a listed park since 1937.
At this urban interface between the former St. Marx cemetery and the adjacent residential structure, the theme of burial and commemoration is to be further considered in today's context. An integral part of the design task is the landscape architectural design of the site, which thematises the cemetery as the oldest inner-city open space in relation to its present-day morphological surroundings.
As integrative design, the course is based on the examination of architecture as a spatial, social, constructive and physical-ecological phenomenon. The main focus will be on the design in relation to the surrounding open space and the existing landscape. Furthermore, the previous designs of the previous semesters will be connected and the topic of monolithic building will be critically discussed.
Based on a comprehensive analysis of the existing situation, architecture is understood as a process that fathoms and transforms morphological-typological contexts as well as social structures. By dealing with different scales, from urban morphology, to the composition of concrete buildings, to materialisation and construction development in detail, architecture is understood and used as a multi-layered discipline in all dimensions.
The March excursion will include a visit to both ancient and contemporary cemeteries. We will begin with several Etruscan Necropolis (literally city of the dead) of the 8th to 1st century BCE. The necropolis mirrored the city of the living, often built with houses, streets, household servants and domestic items such as clothing, cooking and storage implements, utensils, furniture and luxury goods (either actual or as replicas) The rituals, symbolism and monumental architecture of the necropolis sought to re-establish the roles of those interred in the afterlife (i.e. king while alive, to be king of the dead) and in so doing also established hereditary rights and roles through specific orders, symbolism, ritual form and calculated alignment with cosmic phenomena. Therefore, credentials and authority might be established not only via myth, narrative and symbolism - but via technical and mathematical knowledge which produced monumental materio-formal order which in concert with the sun, moon, planets and stars produced demonstrable phenomenological affects. Ultimately, seeing and experiencing is believing.
Following this trajectory, this excursion will be focused on the hands-on experience of a field study. Drawings, photography, filming and writing will be expected as forms of documentation and study. In the aftermath of the trip, students would be expected to show their spatial investigation and spatial understanding of the early precedents as they have been translated in 20th and 21st century examples.
We will start the excursion on 18.03.2022 at 13:00 in Rome. The trip will take us through Pitigliano, Bologna and Piacenza to Milan, where the collective part will end on 22.03.2022 around 17:00. With the participation at the excursion the students receive a certificate for the LVA excursion (2 ECTS).
DATES AND ATTENDANCE
First meeting of participants on 28 February at 11:00 for preliminary digital coordination via zoom
https://tuwien.zoom.us/j/99293356812?pwd=RVRseU8xcmlMSlV0L1BtSzhTam5lQT09Meeting-ID: 992 9335 6812 Passwort: Friedhof22Kick-off event followed by building site visit on 3 March from 11:00 am.
Dates for the supervision of students are generally on Thursdays from 9:00 to 14:00.
In addition, two workshop weeks are planned for intensive work in a shared workspace atmosphere, as the exchange with colleagues is to be promoted through joint work on site. Attendance during these weeks is expected to be as continuous as possible.
Special dates: Field Trip from 18.03. - 22.03.2022 to ItalyConcept presentation on 7 and 8 April, design presentation on 12 and 13 May, final presentation on 23 and 24 June
Detailed basic research of existing spatial and social structures and principles. Analyses of monolithic construction through constructive, building physics, spatial and atmospheric aspects of the respective material. Evidence of the research by means of a logbook kept throughout.
Planning, textual and graphic implementation of a subsequent concept and design at scales of 1:5000 to 1:1. Site plans, floor plans, sections, elevations, façade sections, details, spatial principle representations, perspectives, models.
