After successful completion of the course, students are able to develop architectural strategies that do justice to the complexity of building in existing urban contexts and intervening in existing buildings. They will be able to create a design that synthesises the complex requirements of the urban realm, urban open space, the adjacent space-creating façades, existing buildings, the constructional parameters of the loadbearing structure and constructional sustainability.The students will be able to carry out autonomous research in order to architecturally capture existing urban spatial and built structures, represent these in plans and analytical models and, on this basis, develop conceptual spatial solutions. They will understand both the interaction between the urban fabric and buildings and the ways in which this can be transformed through documentary analysis.The students will be in a position to draw up concepts and design projects in plan, image, model and text on the basis of their own research, and to position, discuss and present these projects in the context of a specialist discussion.
URBANES BAUENSEMBLEA resilient and sustainable city emerges from the situative repair of established structures through the selective and precise remodelling and densification of the existing morphology. Many places in the city require not a masterplan but, much more, our situative awareness of the potential that can result from addressing the existing from a new perspective.The combination of and relationship between two or more individual buildings forms a built ensemble. And the spaces between the buildings of a built ensemble become streets and squares, which are thus transformed from background elements into spatial figures. As large-scale living rooms and public spaces, streets and squares have been used in many new and different ways over the generations. It is the fascinating relationships between buildings and these urban spaces that create the dense European city, with the help of walls, windows, entrances – the thresholds between inside and outside – and the carefully designed spaces between buildings. The design of a built ensemble should pay particular attention to two elements: The first element is the space-creating façade, with all its contentual ambiguity: as a climate-regulating envelope and threshold, as an intermediary between public and private space, as the expression of a building. The second element is the urban open space: determined by the materiality of its surfaces, topography and planting. Research-based design investigates the sensitive relationship between buildings and open spaces as the key to transforming the city into a climate-resilient and user-oriented place. BAUENSEMBLE AM STADTPARKThe Hotel Intercontinental in Vienna’s 3rd district, which was built in 1964 at the interface between the Eislaufverein and the Stadtpark, is outdated in both building physics and functional terms, interrupts the sequence of open spaces of the Wiental and, as a solitary block, fails to create any urban space. Instead of this, the building forms a spatial barrier within the urban fabric, a front and a back that have no relationship with each other. At the same time, the building is a major store of grey energy and, hence, one of a growing number of buildings that could be given a second life with the help of precise interventions and constructional transformations. The project seeks to transform the block into an urban built ensemble consisting of at least two buildings und urban open spaces, which can be used as an innovative students’ residence and which reinterprets and repairs the urban situation at the beginning of the Stadtpark. The spatial and material potential of the existing building will be investigated and strategies developed for its constructional adaption and transformation. There will be a focus on the practice of urban mining. The elements that have to be removed during this transformation should be reused in situ.
From the strategic starting point of a transformation that repairs the urban spatial situation, the potential of the existing open space will be investigated in the context of such issues as consumption-free, public space for all and the future requirements for the climate resilience of the city. The basis for the development of the concept will be a precise analysis of the urban morphology and the reading and description of the significant elements and traces in the urban context.We will develop action-oriented documentation related to a new practice of dealing with the urban realm and existing buildings from the 1960s and sustainable strategies for repairing existing urban spaces and buildings. The rapprochement with the existing, expanded urban realm and its spatial sequences of open spaces, infrastructure and buildings – as well as between public and private space – will take place with the help of conceptual and working models. Urban interfaces and the adjacent façades will be investigated in the same way.
TIMETABLE AND PRESENCESupervision meetings every Friday from 10:00 to 18:00. Kick-off event on 6th October from 11:30, followed by a site visit at 16:00.
Special dates: Urban planning workshop on 19 and 20.10.2023 Concept presentation on 10.11.2023 Design presentation on 15.12.2023 Final presentation on 08.02./ 09.02.2024
Detailed research into existing urban and built structures and the principles of urban repair through the transformation of urban space and existing buildings in the context of the discussion topics: climate-resilient cities, the decarbonisation of existing buildings and urban mining. Evidence of this research in the form of a continuously kept logbook.The plan-based, pictorial, graphic and textual implementation of a concept developed from this research at scales ranging from 1:5,000 to 1:10. Site plans, floor plans, sections, elevations, façade sections, details, presentations of conceptual principles, visualisations, models.
