After successful completion of the course, students are able to recognize architectural issues as social issues and derive spatial concepts and specific architectural designs from them. Through independent work, they learn to think for and through design, enriching their individual attitudes with a deeper understanding of the interpersonal implications of architecture. Students grasp basic concepts of architectural design such as form, function, place, and its elementary operations, inference and deduction, as conditions of social coexistence. This will enable them to give meaning and expression to design, its representation, and its display.

This year's edition of the Venice Biennale, self-declared the "most important architectural show in the world," is titled: "A Laboratory of the Future." Curator Lesley Lokko also refers with the title to the Biennale itself: "La Biennale di Venezia itself is also a kind of laboratory of the future, a time and space in which speculations about the discipline's relevance to this world - and the world to come - take place."
Vittorio Gregotti had given the first architecture exhibition in the context of the 1975 Biennale the task of not being a navel-gazing show of international architects, but rather an active examination of the problems of the city. Almost nothing has remained of this claim. For the old city, the Biennale is mainly one of its most important economic enterprises, which both spatially delimits and expands itself and has turned away from it in terms of content. Yet it is precisely the many activities directly and indirectly connected with the large annual exhibitions that would offer the opportunity to make the Biennale a contribution to a lively urban life in Venice. The planning and production work for the exhibition contributions, which is usually still done abroad, as well as the stays of the staff members, who often travel from all over the world for the exhibitions, which often last weeks or months, could take advantage of the increasing vacancy rate in the depopulating city.
For the limited land of Venice's old city is subject to massive economic development pressures. Space is both scarce and abundant. Scarce in the sense of affordability, abundant in the form of dilapidated vacancies in need of renovation. It is precisely this paradox that the Biennale uses for its spatial expansion, thereby fueling already existing speculative processes that deprive numerous properties of an affordable rental segment.
The aim of the design, with the involvement of local initiatives, is to develop a first building block of a possible counter-model. The conversion of a vacant building is to be designed, which is to be shared by the local population and the biennial. It is to provide accommodation and working space for the exhibition teams of national pavilions and at the same time provide affordable space and infrastructure for the local population. A "shared" architecture. The aim is a permanent process that goes beyond building architecture to interweave the content and space of the biennial with the social and economic realities of the city. An architecture that not only allows differences, but lets them share a space. At its core is the realization that built architecture is not a container, not a stage of coexistence, but a concrete intervention in social relations.

The course aims to convey that architecture is always associated with a reconstruction, i.e. a shift in social relations, which must therefore be grasped theoretically and socio-spatially.  
Over the full duration of the design course, the focus is therefore on the examination of theoretical texts and the parallel writing of one's own texts, the preparation of sketches and drawings, and the construction of physical models as the most important tools for thinking about and working out architecture. Accompanying assignments, input lectures at the beginning of the exercises as well as workshops and an excursion to Venice with a visit to the Biennale serve to deepen the content, the joint discussion and the conceptual sharpening of the individual projects.

Meetings every Tuesday between 14.00 and 18.30 at the TU

Kick-off 10.10.23 14.00 h

Please plan the date 17.10-20.10.2023 for an excursion to Venice. Travel and accommodation have to be organized independently!

Preliminary program:


18.10.2023 Visit to the Biennale in the Giardini and Arsenale (full day).


19.10.2023 Morning: city walk through the Castello district with local initiatives.
Relationship Biennale / City Afternoon: Site visit


20.10.2023 Morning: Research on the morphology of Venice Afternoon: Departure

 
We are looking forward to your registrations via portfolio!

Research and documentation of existing spatial and social structures in Venice. Analyses of typological, constructive, spatial and atmospheric aspects of local architecture. Planning, textual and graphic realization of a concept to be derived from this. Elaboration of a design by means of models and representations in different scales. Regular presentations to guests from Venetian initiatives, the Biennale as well as the architecture and city planning.