After successful completion of the course, students are able to recognize the problems and potentials of the built environment, to derive directional planning questions from them and to answer these questions through the specific formulation of a conceptual architectural and urban design. Spatial production is to be experienced as a holistic, transdisciplinary examination on the basis of a design-oriented task. Architecture and urban design should be understood as a cultural practice with social relevance and as a design challenge including its social, economic, ecological and process-related implications. The teaching of adequate methods of analysis, design and representation and the introduction to relevant discourses are an essential part of the course.
The goal of the course is to learn to work with the speculative reality of architecture and urbanism in the productive confusion of the periphery.
Cemeteries are mysterious. They remind us of the past and at the same time always point to the future. As our lives go on, we get closer and closer to them. The same is true of our cities. The progressive expansion of urban areas has already brought back the municipal cemeteries that were moved to the edges of the cities in the 19th century. What were once peripheral areas are becoming recreational spaces and future destinations for urban development. This studio focuses on Vienna's Central Cemetery to explore what alternative orders and constellations can be designed out of this contradictory situation.
The Central Cemetery was opened in 1874, as a consequence of the banishment of cemeteries from the densely populated city for hygienic reasons, far outside the gates of Vienna, beyond the Linienwall. The cemetery can be seen as one of the first representatives of those infrastructures that were outsourced to the periphery as a "disturbing" function, but one that was essential for the functioning of the city. A development that was to characterize the entire surroundings of the Central Cemetery from the late 19th century on. Here, in front of the city, there was enough space for the many dead of a rapidly growing metropolis, but the location in the periphery was unpopular with the Viennese from the beginning. The site was barren and difficult to reach, and the way there was desolate. To this day, infrastructures and functions are located here that have no place in the city, but perform central tasks for it: Slaughterhouses, port and industrial facilities, former gas storage facilities, railroad tracks and marshalling yards, the city's largest power plant, the main sewage treatment plant and the main workshop of Wiener Linien are located here.
In order to understand this complex spatial network, we devote ourselves in a first phase of the design to the pioneer of these banished urban deposits - the Central Cemetery. For through targeted planning interventions, the initially unpopular, desolate site became a morbid landmark of the city and today fulfills far more than its original function as a burial ground: it is a place of representation with a high (architectural) cultural significance, a (sung about) landmark, a local recreation area, a place to walk and run, and, as a green island in the midst of intensively used fields, glass houses, and sealed territories, it forms a high-quality ecological niche.
From the central cemetery, the view is directed in the further course of the design again to its edges. Different questions will accompany us this semester: What conclusions can be drawn from the examination of the development of the central cemetery for an urgently needed new approach to the patchwork of supply, disposal and logistics infrastructures? What new roles can cemetery sites assume in the periurban context? In what ways can cemetery sites historically located outside of core cities be integrated into growing urban landscapes?
Freed from the strict ideal images of traditional, homogenous urban spaces and thoroughly planned, marketable satellite cities, the context of a still raw periphery allows us an undreamt-of freedom in our considerations and designs. Can we develop our own urban logic here, on the edge of the city but not yet in the countryside, in this territory characterized by fractures, leaps in scale and contradictions?
Four design tasks
We are working on speculative designs and develope scenarios at a variety of scales, for selected peripheral areas between the cemetery site and its surroundings. Using the means of architectural and urban design, we aim to make a critical contribution to the discourse and to engage in a deep examination of the relationship between the cemetery and the city.
1st Exercise: S - Objects and Rules (5.3. - 19.3.)
Artifacts / burial sites / burial ground regulations / ...
Design and placement of a grave of honor for a well-known representative of architecture and urban planning: Where in the central cemetery should it be located? How should it be designed? Spatial examination of the overall layout of the Central Cemetery and the theoretical/planning approaches of a person. Conscious decision-making on the design and positioning of the honorary grave on the basis of the burial ground regulations.
2nd exercise: XL - areas and places (19.3. - 16.4.)
Dedication / regulation / characteristics / special places / ...
3rd exercise: M - Spaces and forms (16.4. - 7.5.)
Street spaces / urban spaces / landscape spaces
Superimposing and interpretative extension of the "planned" logic of the Central Cemetery and that of its surroundings; creating gates, breakthroughs, passageways, etc.; connections, barriers, large-scale structures, small-scale structures.
4th exercise: L - structures and transitions (7.5. - 25.6. / workshop 27. - 28.5.)
Building structures / landscape structures / infrastructures
Due to the restrictions of the Corona pandemic, the LVA will be conducted via TUWEL course, but adaptation to hybrid teaching format will be sought if the possibility arises due to relaxations.
