After successful completion of the course, students are able to develop architectural solution strategies that take into account the complexity of building in urban spaces and existing buildings. They can form a design synthesis from the complex requirements of the landscape and urban space, the existing building stock and its structural framework conditions such as building physics, load-bearing structure and sustainability.
Through independent research, students can architecturally record existing urban and building structures, represent them in terms of planning and in analytical models, and develop conceptual spatial solutions on this basis. They can understand the interrelationship between urban fabric and building as well as its transformation through documentary analyses.
The students are able to create concepts and design projects in plan, image, model and text on the basis of their own research, to situate them in the professional discourse, to discuss and present them.

URBAN SPACE WIENTAL  
In the context of urbanistic and urban climatic discourses, the Wiental reveals its special urban spatial potential, which requires an overarching planning strategy as a framework for action for all actors. The hybrid space – city and at the same time urban landscape band with reference to the Vienna Woods – represents a sensitive urban ecological system that can be read and developed on the basis of urban morphological studies.
The current practice of selective, structural interventions without a comprehensive guiding model endangers the potentials for the growing metropolis of Vienna that are effective for the city as a whole. In order to maintain and develop the city as a living space for all residents under changing climatic conditions, the premises and concrete practice of urban and project planning must be renegotiated.

CASE STUDY MEIDLING
Using the example of the urban situation of the Wienfluss river as it enters the Gründerzeit city at the level of the U4 subway station Meidlinger Hauptstrasse, strategies of urban repair are to be examined. Since its construction as the former terminus of the “Gürtellinie” (the Viennese Stadtbahn, a rail-based public transportation system around the inner city districts of Vienna) in 1898, the hub of the public transport system has been continuously adapted to the requirements. In the course of the extension of the U4 to Hütteldorf in 1981, a hybrid office, commercial and multi-storey car park was built above the new Meidlinger Hauptstraße station, creating a leap in scale in the urban landscape of the Wiental. In the immediate vicinity, on the former Komet grounds, another large-volume office and commercial complex with an integrated shopping mall is currently being built, deepening this detachment from the urban fabric.
For this urban focal point in the Wiental, a strategy for urban repair is to be developed based on the transformation of the island-like hybrid building above the U4 station.

CASE STUDY GAUDENZDORF
At the intersection of the four Viennese municipal districts of Margareten, Mariahilf, Meidling and Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus is another area of observation whose complex historical, topographical and social layers produced an unresolved urban knot. The former floodplain of the now vaulted Wienfluss river marked the transition between the city and the surrounding countryside. The so-called “Linienwall“ (outer line of fortifications around the city) that later ran here, the city and customs border at the time, defines the transition between socially opposing residential areas and marked a morphological as well as social demarcation that is still present and perceptible today. With the advent of electrification, a gasworks was established on this urban periphery, the operation of which led to contamination of the area. The result is a persistently tabooed wasteland in the area, which has since become part of the inner-city fabric. With the razing of the Linienwall, intensive use as a traffic area finally began: the island-like green space is now enclosed by up to 9 lanes in places. The current urban situation is the result of these and other historical circumstances: a hollow space in the urban fabric, enclosed by traffic flows.

For this challenge in the Wiental, contemporary urban building blocks are to be developed that are capable of moderating the historically grown disharmonies and can contribute to clarifying the complex urban situation.

Based on the strategy of a reparative transformation of the existing urban space and buildings, the spatial potentials of the existing and its traces of time are discursively examined and placed in the context of the question of consumption-free, public space for all as well as the future requirements of the city's climate resilience. The basis of the concept development is a precise urban morphological and building typological inventory analysis as well as reading and describing the significant elements and traces in the urban space.
Development of an action-oriented documentation on a new practice of dealing with urban space and on sustainable repair strategies in the urban and structural stock.  
The approach to the existing urban and landscape space and its spatial sequences of outdoor space, infrastructure and buildings as well as between public and private spaces is carried out using conceptual and working models. The investigation of the urban interfaces, on the one hand along the river and on the other across the river and connecting districts, is carried out equivalently.

DATES AND ATTENDANCE
Supervision dates are Fridays from 10:00 to 18:00

Special dates:                                                                           
Concept presentation on 31.03.2023
Draft presentation on 19.05.2023
Final presentation on 07.07.2023
Kick-off event on 3 March from 10:00 a.m., followed by a tour of the construction site in the Wiental at 2:00 p.m.

Detailed research into the existing urban and building structures, the principles of urban repair by means of transforming the urban space and the existing buildings in the context of the discourse topics of climate resilience of the city and decarbonisation of the stock. Evidence of the research by means of a continuously maintained logbook.
Planning, pictorial, graphic and textual realisation of a concept and design developed from this at scales of 1:5,000 to 1:10. Site plans, floor plans, sections, views, façade section, details, conceptual principle representations, pictorial representations, models.