A...kademie der bildenden Künste Institute for Art and Wien Architecture Institut für Kunst und Architektur
Preview Summer Pressure 2023 Cultivation BArch Design Studios 3–8
ADP ESC GLC BArch Courses 9–15
MArch Design Studios 17–22 ADP CMT HTC MArch Courses 23–24
Electives 25–26
Doctoral Studies 27–28 Research Projects 29 Lecture Series 30–31 Calendar Labs 32
Sustainability Landscapes Commons Cultural Cohabitation Heritage Construction Material Environments Geography History Technology Building Scale Sun Cities Borders Acoustics Analogue Criticism Microclimates Digital Earth Theory Production Ecology
Institute for Art and Architecture Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Summer 2023
3– 8 9 –15
BArch BArch
Chair / Deputies: Schillerplatz 3 Wolfgang Tschapeller 1010 Vienna Christina Condak akbild.ac.at / ika Lisa Schmidt-Colinet arch@akbild.ac.at Editor: Christina Jauernik Proofreading and Translation: Judith Wolfframm
Design Studios Courses
Office: Room 213, 2nd floor Ulrike Auer +43 (1) 58816-5101 u.auer@akbild.ac.at Gabriele Mayer +43 (1) 58816-5102 g.mayer@akbild.ac.at
Graphic design: Beton Paper: Juwel, 60g / m² Typeface: NHG 55 Printing: Holzhausen
Scale Acoustics
BArch2 Mon / Tue / Fri
ADP Analogue Digital Production
Wolfgang Tschapeller Valerie Messini
Notes on Concert Halls and Chamber Music Rooms Largest Orchestra of the World. Caracas, November 13, 2021. Photo: Federico PARRA / AFP
Overcoats Concert halls are like large overcoats. Cut not for one, but for many. Not for the dimensions of one person, but for one person’s fit into one stitch in the fabric. Concert halls are a special collective garment where the audience slips neither into the empty hull, nor into the sleeves. Instead, they dovetail between the fabric’s fibers, their seats, where their backs seek holohedral touch with the seat’s surface. Skin on skin. In full contact with a given construction’s specialized webbing, the auditors collectively form a superorganism, sometimes including and sometimes separated from the orchestra and sound makers. Size and Steepness Concert halls are a singular species of space. Firstly, their size is not measured in square meters. Their unit of measurement is a piece
of furniture, a chair, a seat combined with a certain-sized volume of air. Seats are approximately 50 cm wide and about 90 cm deep, and the volume of air coming with the seat typically measures around 8.6 m³. These cubic meters of air are not for breathing; they are reserved for acoustical purposes to allow for an immersive ambient sound to build. A chamber music room holding 500 seats would then have to contain a volume of 8.6 m³ air × 500 seats, amounting to 4,300 m³ of air to enable sound to travel in space and time in specific ways. Secondly, seats are organized in rows, often on oblique planes, sometimes on quite steep surfaces, and stacked upward on vertical walls, sometimes overhanging, cantilevering. In contrast to a house, the human’s place here in the acoustical condition is not restricted to the horizontal; it is in the air.
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Blindness and Babylonian Confusion The architect Theophil Hansen must have been a contrary character. For the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, he built the assembly hall not as a space for conversations, lectures and debates, but as an encyclopedia of flutter echoes, as if he wanted to demonstrate the futility of communication, or rather to teach by negative example the importance of the acoustic qualities, that is the importance of the invisible, the immaterial in physical space. Hansen did it intentionally! He set up a didactic game, because only six years earlier and not more than 550 meters from the Academy, and in seeming absence of any established scientific methodology, he constructed the Golden Hall in the Musikverein (1876) as one of the role models and prototypes of the acoustics of modern concert halls. What was he after?
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For the eyes – the Academy of Fine Arts as a contraption for Babylonian confusion? For the ears – the Golden Hall of the Musikverein as gilded mirror that blinds? Horses Concert halls, like horses, often come in herds. In different sizes and qualities. The Konzerthaus in Vienna has five halls. The Musikverein contains five as well, four of them named after materials: gold, glass, stone, metal and wood. Concert halls – contemporary or not – descend from other times. They puncture the present like the horses of Jared Diamond, who speculates that such an old species needs a long neck to span the distance between their coming into the world and our present times.
Notes on Concert Halls and Chamber Music Rooms
Environments Earth
BArch4 Mon / Tue / Fri
ESC Ecology Sustainability Cultural Heritage
Ground Expansions Hannes Stiefel Luciano Parodi
Antoine Vercoutère, Media Library of Perceived Spaces, 2016
I believe that where the sky and the earth collide, elements of the earth and the sky produce an intervention – the first architectural event. Raimund Abraham, Site: The Meaning of Place in Art and Architecture (1983)
Umwelt ist ein Netzwerk von Lebensräumen. Lebensraum ist Biotop: die Ganzheit von Ort und Natur. Alles ist Natur – es gibt nur einen Grad von Natürlichkeit. Es ist unerheblich, ob ein Biotop durch Naturgewalt oder durch Menschenhand entsteht. Eduard Neuenschwander, Niemandsland – Umwelt zwischen Zerstörung und Gestalt (1988)
We no longer design buildings as single objects. We explore and design processes and structures in and for Critical Environments that reflect, convert and mediate between the dynamic interplay of those natural and human forces that shape the constructions of the crust of the earth – and we co-construct their poetic conditions. Excerpt from ESC’s mission statement
Architecture is an environment. Buildings are environments. Works of architecture are of a relational and reciprocal nature. From their formation to aging processes to demolition or decay and recycling, buildings catalyze anabolic and catabolic processes and thus contribute
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decisively to the collective behavior of ecological systems. Each built structure can be read – and also consciously conceived or rebuilt – as an ecological instrument in general and as a climatic device in particular, which has the ability to co-orient these systems. Thus, ecological and urban demands and needs can be negotiated and subsequently merged. This is a call for an understanding of buildings as environments, as networks of habitats, integrated into the constructions of the skin of the earth – buildings as expanded grounds. It is a call for a building type that tends to be characterized by hybridity – a result of the interplay of diverse cycles between ground and air, and new ways of sharing grounds. Constructed and grown elements, inside
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Ground Expansions
and outside, above and below, organic and inorganic matter, public and private begin to fuse, adapt to new conditions, alter these conditions in turn, to finally result in a new relationship of form and performance. Light and air, cold and heat are understood as immaterial construction »materials«. The orientation of shadowy spaces, evaporative cooling and questions of biodiversity constitute central factors for the design of buildings as environments. They become decisive aspects of the formulation of physical space and the interaction between its protagonists and their environments. IKA is the Institute of Art and Architecture. And the potentially highest art of architecture is the art of building: building as an applied, art-based environmental research practice. It is worth striving for, constantly and continuously.
Sun Commons
BArch6 Mon / Tue / Fri
GLC Geography Landscapes Cities
Aristide Antonas Daniela Herold
Battery City Athens
Aristide Antonas, Remains of multiple mythologies, Athens, 2022
The project is an investigation of the possibilities of contemporary cities’ energy. The city of Athens will be the territory of examination and design. Here, the phenomenon of declining urban life is inverted by an exploration of how to charge the city with alternative common life. This energy is conceived both metaphorically, as an investment of the minimum material intervention to produce maximum new energy for city life, and also literally, as a quest for alternative battery technologies feeding the electricity network of the city. The city of Athens serves as an example; having already suffered from Greece’s financial turbulence and decline, it can serve as a model of a post-crisis urban space par excellence. It is conceived both as a social environment and as a technical setting that can collect
solar energy or, in some cases, wind energy. The expansion of battery and photovoltaic technologies, together with the new urban implications of the increasing use of electric vehicles and scooters, creates a different context for any city. The studio investigates these new urban parameters and challenges through the design of some pilot projects. The spatial context will be a typical city block. Every block has the potential to offer energy, collected by the use of elementary constructions. A city block including minimum common spaces can also be rethought to give ground to some common gatherings. The programming of this public part of the project is related to a set of proposed microinstitutions that can operate in the empty spaces of the city. A legislative operation allowing the occupation of selected private
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or public spaces is possible and can be discussed with specialists. Furthermore, a question about this common ground is related to contemporary life, updated in line with and structured by the massive use of the networks. The increasing use of batteries poses more issues for this image of the contemporary city. The renewable energy concept is explored as a promise of an alternative architectural design for the city of Athens. Common projects towards a more sustainable city-scape and new options for alternative gathering spaces in the contemporary city are needed in order to update city life to fit the given structure of contemporary life. If the Airbnb phenomenon is showing the tension of greater fragmentation of built city centers and increasing the value of small independent apartments, the studio of this semester seeks to shed light on the
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Battery City Athens
remaining city spaces, which could maintain their character but also perform new roles. City openings and urban blocks become the basis for proposing shared mechanisms for gathering or working together in »public«.
ADP
Analogue, Digital, Production
3D Modelling and Animation I
Werner Skvara
Project Lecture BArch2
The course covers the fundamentals of 3D modelling in computer-aided design. It provides students with an understanding of different types of modelling techniques and the skills to construct virtual models, extract two-dimensional visualizations and design basic animations. The course is closely connected to the BArch2 design studio.
ADP
Analogue, Digital, Production
Eva Sommeregger
Project Lecture BArch2
Interactive Design, Film Editing and Sound, Scripting
We will dive into the world of interactivity and investigate film as a basis for the creation of (human) identities. By exploring scripts and scores, we will examine the constructs necessary to realise time-based spaces. Ultimately different tools will be employed to produce fluid interactive spaces: their genuinely dynamic characteristics will be captured by students, resulting in spatial and time-based drawings, i.e. audio and video artefacts, that expand the limitations of twodimensional static architectural representations.
ADP
Analogue, Digital, Production
3D Modelling and Animation III
René Ziegler
Seminar BArch6
In this course we will add live physical properties to our digital Rhino with Grasshopper models. The course will introduce Kangaroo, a live physics engine for interactive simulation, form-finding, optimization and constraint solving. We will apply the solver library and a set of Grasshopper components to model structural properties. Furthermore, we will use Ladybug to import and analyse standard weather data in Grasshopper, draw diagrams such as sun-paths and run basic radiation analysis, shadow studies, and view analysis.
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CMT
Construction, Material, Technology Franz Sam
Building Technologies I
Lecture BArch2
Construct Architecture The course offers insight into fundamental aspects of the construction of a building, materials and technologies. It starts from a basic range of materials and their various roles in building construction in its different historical contexts. Students will explore the relationship between material properties, technology and form as a defining principle. In this, the aim is to develop essential knowledge about basic structure and technologies, as well as about their architectural relevance in a broader sense. We will discuss historically important applications and put them in relation to contemporary and cutting-edge technologies. In doing so, we will reflect on building practices and architectural construction, providing a comprehensive overview of construction technologies.
CMT
Construction, Material, Technology René Ziegler
Building Structures II
Lecture BArch2
The course develops the students' understanding of structural and material behaviour. Here, the teaching of building structures is integrated into the design process. This allows students to apply this knowledge directly to their design and receive professional advice for their specific projects.
CMT
Construction, Material, Technology Luciano Parodi
Building Technologies III
Seminar BArch4
In Detail Building Technologies III aims to consolidate students’ knowledge of materials, construction and planning. The courses subjects of discussion are the production of details and the reciprocity between construction and detailing processes. Details and its presence or necessity for the production of buildings have been uttermost discussed in architectural discourse, but so far only on a visual level. Thus remaining the discussion on the surface of things. We intend therefore to explore the genesis of ideas and architectures departing from the very core and intrinsic characteristics of the discreet detail.
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Courses
ESC
Ecology, Sustainability, Cultural Heritage Franz Sam
Project Lecture BArch4
Sustainability I
The course Sustainability I is set up in a holistic way. It starts with aspects of materials, technology and expected form, and leads to questions of social behaviour and its impact on the sustainable development of structures and construction. It provides an overview of aspects of and motives for sustainable behaviour by looking at projects concerned with recycling and upcycling. This will help students understand interactions and processes of negotiating between social, functional and structural requirements. Developing sustainable solutions under specific, social and technical conditions encourages flexibility and creativity in making use of formal possibilities, materials and technologies.
ESC
Ecology, Sustainability, Cultural Heritage Thomas Matthias Romm
Project Lecture BArch4
Ecologies II
Sufficiency, efficiency and resilience are those aspects of sustainability that we will rethink in terms of architecture in this course: cogitamus. Sufficiency – what is essential? Less is more durable. Durability means robustness. What are the basic needs behind the task, what are its adequate means of construction in the Anthropocene? Efficiency – does a circular architecture mean optimizing input and output, or the effective regeneration of resources? 70% of the total material flow and 70% of all waste is due to construction. Only 10% are closed loops. A circular economy is not just based on even more intelligent technologies to become a purpose economy. Are we headed for an architectural culture with artificial intelligence at its end point? Resilience – climate change is putting existing structures under stress. The importance of various regions and cities is shifting, even vanishing after global peak oil. Millions of people’s lives are affected by this change. A one-world architecture needs parameters enabling us to act so as to affect the universal setting of our collective existence (Bruno Latour).
ESC
Ecology, Sustainability, Cultural Heritage Golmar Kempinger-Khatibi
Cultural Heritage II
Lecture BArch6
The course will focus on different approaches of dealing with cultural heritage as architects, artists, and users. We look at buildings and materials and their passage through time and the possibilities of continued use by maintenance, repair, replacement, and sustainable retrofitting. We observe and learn from the performance of our local buildings and ways of adapting and implementing the experiences to new buildings and the life-styles and climate conditions of today.
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ESC
Ecology, Sustainability, Cultural Heritage Thomas Proksch
Sustainability II
Lecture BArch6
Models of Sustainability – Sustainable Urbanism and Architecture between Claims and Reality At the beginning of every project there is maybe not writing but a definition in words – a text – a concept, ambition, or theme that is put in words, and only at the moment that it is put in words can we begin to proceed, to think about architecture; the words unleash the design [...]. Rem Koolhaas
The starting point for the lectures is my experience as a landscape architect and ecologist. For many years, I have been contributing – as a consultant for landscape design and together with architects – to urban designs and architectural solutions regarding the site of a project, the specificities of its urban structure, its landscape situation and its socio-spatial conditions. By means of reference projects, we will discuss whether incorporating the principles of sustainability into the planning process can contribute to improving planning results. The lecture will be conversational, and will be accompanied by excursions and city walks.
HTC
History, Theory, Criticism
Antje Lehn
Writing on Architecture, Landscapes and Cities
Seminar BArch4
The seminar addresses the use of written and spoken language in architecture. Texts dealing with architecture will be produced, read and analysed together. Small exercises will therefore also be given. The aim is to strengthen the students' ability to express themselves precisely and independently about architecture. The languages used will mainly be German and English.
HTC
History, Theory, Criticism
Ines Weizman
Histories and Theories of Cities
Lecture BArch6
Starting with ancient cultures and cities the lecture will give both an overview about the historical development of cities and about the way this development is influencing the theories on cities. In an alternating rhythm the lecture will first present theories on cities, and then explain the historic/social/built reality of them by means of selected examples. Not only the theories of urban historians like Leonardo Benevolo, Lewis Mumford, Ernst Egli which describe the structural development of the cities will be discussed, also theories and narratives that try to grasp the mythical, social, and political reality of cities.
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Courses
GLC
Geography, Landscapes, Cities
Maria Auböck
Landscapes and Gardens
Lecture BArch4
This module offers a lecture series on landscape architecture and garden art and a field trip in Vienna. Students will be given an insight into the conceptual quality and materiality of landscape architecture and landscape design in public spaces and private sites. In times of climate change, students shall train their creativity for a global context as well as learn about the environmental qualities of local sites and how to select vegetation and material structures suitable for use. Moreover, the main objective of this course is to acquire knowledge on issues of urban design, landscape architecture and garden history. The lectures inform about cultural history, natural science and project-relevant issues, including relevant recent landscape projects. The quality of vegetation as well as selected materials for the use in open spaces, i. e. steel, glass, stone and wood, are presented and discussed. Christopher Alexander wrote: »the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature as you make it.«
GLC
Geography, Landscapes, Cities
Infrastructures and Networks
Bernd Vlay
Lecture BArch4
Hardly anything is more depressing than going straight to the goal. Cedric Price
This course uses (and abuses) the concepts of infrastructure in order to discuss the potential of urban and architectural design. Cedric Price fundamentally questioned how things are and should be related to one another, addressing the framework itself as a fundamental issue of architectural intervention. Infrastructures are infamous for FRAMING architecture: they have to be there BEFORE architecture can start its operation. The architect usually has to navigate through conditions already present, predetermined by the infrastructural elements. In this class, we will explore and question this hierarchy, looking at different phenomena of infrastructure and networks. We will study the intricate relationships between physical and virtual conditions, revealing their influence on the power, responsibility and limitations of architectural thinking and doing that is at the very heart of architecture.
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GLC
Geography, Landscapes, Cities
Strategies for Cities
Christian Lichtenwagner
Project Lecture BArch6
Every panel on urban development argues its importance with the fact that more than 50% of the world’s population live in metropolitan areas. It remains the big challenge for the 21st century. But we should question, why societies essentially do need the »city«? What are the principles behind the concept of the city? What strategies do planners, designers and politicians use to deal with the challenges in urban development? What tactics do the »urbanities« need to live their daily life in contemporary urban agglomerations? And: What happens to the periphery? »Strategies for Cities« will open the urban debate by introducing social geography as a scientific platform for the urban field, as the urban geographer Edward Soja states: »Let cities be first!« This summer term we will approach three sites as reference: Ciudad autónoma de Buenos Aires, as the center of a metropolitan area with 13 million inhabitants, City of Vienna, as the primary city in the trans-border region Centrope, and Kirchheim unter Teck, as a sub-center region of Stuttgart.
GLC
Geography, Landscapes, Cities
Urbanism II
Christian Teckert
Project Lecture BArch6
Rethinking Urban Futures of the Recent Past The analysis of discursive formations in contemporary urbanism will be at the core of the lecture series. It will include fields like sociology, art, media theory, philosophy and critical geography, which have been decisive for the current debates. In a situation where no hegemonic method or unitary approach can be detected in urbanism, and after it has been claimed that urbanism as a discipline is facing irrelevance, this lecture series will be based on a critical discussion of the crucial theoretical debates and key terms in contemporary urbanism, like »network urbanism«, »tactical urbanism,« the »city within the city« or the »city of exacerbated difference.« At the same time, it will consider new methodological approaches to the realm of urban research, analysis and mapping, which increasingly represent an urbanistic practice in their own right.
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Courses
GLC
Geography, Landscapes, Cities
Lisa Schmidt-Colinet Seminar BArch2
Documentation and Representation in Geographies, Landscapes, Cities
The map is positioned between creating and recording the city. It is this dual function, that release the imaginative energy of mapping, and which has consistently attracted the attention of artists as well as technicians to urban mapping. Denis Cosgrove, CartoCity, in Janet Abrams, Peter Hall (Eds.): Else/Where: Mapping: New Cartographies of Networks and Territories, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis 2006
Visual representation, as a project in itself, has the potential to reveal and uncover surprising realities of places. The complexity of a site obliges us to make clear decisions and rigorously sort information, but more importantly, it requires inventive interpretations of and a position towards the terrain observed. This seminar explores how techniques of representation, the selection of materials and the intentions of a site’s description are strongly interrelated. Gradual differences between tools of representing architecture as built form and modes of representing intricate interdependencies of a city fragment will be investigated. The course opens the scope from small-scale observation to the complexity of the urban terrain, focusing on the forces and processes that are the basis of urban form. Students will discover how a small site influences and affects the larger scale of a city. They will experiment with the visualization of underlying processes – starting from phenomenological observations and moving towards an understanding of effects, describing the territory as a complex set of relations. In addition, lectures will formulate a genealogy of urban representations.
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17– 22 MArch Design Studios 23 – 24 MArch Courses 25 – 26 Electives
Pressure Building
MArch Mon / Tue / Fri
ADP Analogue Digital Production
Susanne Zottl Norbert Steiner
Diagenesis A Choreography for Architectural Sediments
Thermal mud hole, Island 2009. Photo: Norbert Steiner, 2009.
Not reflection, but forgetting; not contradiction, but a contestation that effaces; not reconciliation, but droning on and on; not mind in laborious conquest of its unity, but the endless erosion of the outside; not truth finally shedding light on itself, but the streaming and distress of a language that has always already begun. »Not speech, barely a murmur, barely a tremor, less than silence, less than the abyss of the void; the fullness of the void, something one cannot silence, occupying all of space, the uninterrupted, the incessant, a tremor and already a murmur, not a murmur but speech, and not just any speech, distinct speech, precise speech, within my reach.«¹ Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside, New York, Zone Books, 1987.
1 Maurice Blanchot, Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas, Paris, Gallimard, 1953.
Resilience and responsiveness in architecture sound like oxymorons: the discipline that has been practiced for thousands of years seems to be cumbersome and inert in its development. Vitruvius’s principles »firmitas« (stability), »utilitas« (utility) and sometimes also »venustas« (aesthetics) are what we witness in our built environment. Built for eternity! Why built for eternity? We postulate that architecture that derives from a process of diagenesis creates resilient structures. These emerge out of existing objects and conditions, and are part of a continuous sequence of creation, alteration, dissolution, and re-creation. Diagenesis in geology describes a process of transformation of sediments into solid matter – concretion – due to pressure and temperature. It is therefore part of the rock
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SCIArc_Gallery_090124_078. Copyright: Mario Buda, 2009.
cycle*, in which solid matter is created, altered, changed and eroded. This cycle takes up to approximately 200 million years. The time lapse of diagenesis is the guiding line of architectural visions. Born into a world we did not create, this is always the task facing us: to adapt ourselves to the world as we find it, or the world to us. Lebbeus Woods, Slow Manifesto, 2009
* Each rock type is altered when it is forced out of its equilibrium conditions.
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ADP
Diagenesis A Choreography for Architectural Sediments
Cohabitation Microclimates
MArch Mon / Tue / Fri
CMT Construction Material Technology
Building Biodiversity – Learning Biodiversity – Creating Biodiverse Environments Michelle Howard
Biodiversity is the variety of all life forms on earth – the different plants, animals and microorganisms, their genes, and the terrestrial, marine and freshwater ecosystems of which they are a part. This diversity exists at different scales: regional diversity, ecosystem diversity, species diversity and genetic diversity. Biodiversity is not static, but constantly changing. It is increased by genetic change and evolutionary processes, and reduced by processes such as habitat degradation, population decline and extinction. Even though humans make up only 0.01% of all living biomass on earth, anthropogenic mass, that is human-made mass, exceeded all global living biomass mass in 2020. The naturalist and writer Edward Osborne Wilson, called the father of socio-biology, said that, »if all humans were to disappear, the world would
regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.« Wilson passed away in 2021, the year we learned that 70% of all insects had been extinguished. Large parts of our countryside have been rendered deserts of biodiversity by the raging monoculture that is deemed necessary to produce enough food for us. In comparison, our cities, while vortexes of anthropogenic mass, often house differentiated and varied forms of habitats. Often the viability or value of a building is judged on the ability to keep it »clean«, which invariably involves the removal of diverse forms of life, like insects, spiders, algae and mosses. Contemporary efforts to include other life forms in cities are invariably restricted to plants and landscaping. They are
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Collecting biopatina from the façade of the Tugendhat House in Brno by Mies van der Rohe. This is part of the research project »Epidermitecture«, a collaboration between INTK and CMT at the IKA. Photo: Michelle Howard
contained within well-defined borders outside buildings, or in pots inside them. This studio investigates how to let more varied forms of life into the hearts, lungs and cells of buildings, proposing new forms of interwoven cohabitation between human and non-human life. Our excursion will take us to Slovenia, the most biodiverse region in Europe.
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CMT
Building Biodiversity
Borders Cultivation
MArch Mon / Tue / Fri
HTC History Theory Criticism
The Political Ecology of the Spit Ines Weizman Christina Condak
Rest during a manoeuvre of the Prussian army in a pine forest, 1903 Credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild 136-B0748.
High sand dunes, pine forests and ‘climate holiday’ resort towns characterise the Curonian Spit on the Baltic Sea coast shared by what is now Russia and Lithuania. However, the pristine appearance of this narrow landscape hides a deep history of human intervention that politicised nature by adding monuments and milestones, gardens, roads and border crossings, and even altering the geological and biological makeup of its terrain almost completely. In the late 19th century, when the area became part of Prussia, of the German Empire, an enormous forest cultivation project was undertaken in order to colonise the land, but also to tame the dynamics of moving dunes and sandstorms. During the First World War, the famous High Dunes of the Spit were even used as military training targets for bombardment from the sea. Tragically,
Second World War histories and present-day border hostilities relating to the war on Ukraine connect, including the intimidation of migrants across the Baltic region. This studio will investigate the impact that the contestation of national borders through military occupations and changing political regimes has had on a vital, yet vulnerable, ecosystem that uniquely interconnects the cultural history and forms of habitation in the Baltic region. We will aim to mine the unique histories entangled in a dynamic landscape of forests, dunes, agriculture, architecture and artistic colonies in order to construct a ‘plant atlas’. At the core of the studio is an excursion to the Nida Art Colony in the Curonian Spit National Park in Lithuania. The studio will involve archival and media research, documentation, film making and mapping, and shall lead to
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a collective presentation of its findings. Two main methodological premises will be shared and explored across disciplines. One follows the method of ‘documentary architecture’, which reads buildings and cultural artefacts as fossilised forces and materialised documents of political transformation and societal change. The other relates to organic matter and the dynamic of growth and natural forces on a larger temporal scale. We will explore how the history of architecture is entangled with the history of resource extraction and how the environmental history of a building can be reconstructed in its very materiality. Just as a building can open itself not just to critical questions about the political, economic and social history of a place, but also to questions of gender, identity and migration history, trees and other biological material can do so as well.
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HTC
The studio will begin with a study trip to Nida on the Curonian Spit 13 – 22 March 2023.
The Political Ecology of the Spit
ADP
Analogue, Digital, Production
Daniel Kerbler
Seminar MArch2
Parametric Modelling and Digital Fabrication
think parametric What impact could a parametric process have on the way designing architects think? In this seminar we will investigate this question by taking the parametric approach out of the box it has been originally conceived for. We will use software that is not exclusively streamlined to solving a predefined set of problems as found in building construction but that is equipped to process a much wider scope of input data. The student will have a chance to research how parametric concepts can be applied to the architectural design-process. Such research will also extend the boundaries of our intellectual approach, of our way we think. Parametric modelling means to »think parametric«. Eventually the parametric concept provides us with a new mindset, that has the potential to remove certain barriers from our thought processes. It can empower us to tackle problem definitions that previously seemed to be inconceivable.
CMT
Construction, Material, Technology Markus Klausecker
Professional Practice I
Seminar MArch2
This course initiates students in professional practice. The responsibilities attached to the erecting or adjustment of our built environment are explored, as well as the processes and administrative hurdles to building.
ESC
Ecology, Sustainability, Cultural Heritage
Seminar MArch2
Well Tempered Environments Peter Leeb
Countless technological inventions have expanded the field of possibilities for shelter production. For coping with heat and cold, protection from wind and humidity, and regulating sunlight and shade, the new tools have been helpful and have inspired us to push the limits of architectural imagination. Yet economic and ecological considerations of resources, as well as their relationship with thermal comfort and mobility, have raised questions with far-reaching implications for architecture. These questions, relating to the history, the methods and the scale of providing comfort in buildings, have moved to the centre of our discipline’s attention. In the course of the seminar, the interdependencies between technology, environment and human expectations of comfort will be portrayed as essentials for architecture, both conceptually and constructively. Historical and contemporary examples will be introduced, and perspectives on future developments will be considered in a critical fashion.
Courses
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HTC
History, Theory, Criticism
Asset Architecture
Andreas Rumpfhuber Seminar MArch2
We will examine the connection between contemporary discourses of financial economies and architecture. The seminar's starting point is the observation that with the increasing decoupling of the financial economy from real economy since the 1970s, the economic logic of profit maximisation and investment has changed: new business models are not only radically altering (and »destroying«) old economies but have direct effect on the production of the built environment. The concept of »asset« will be central to our understanding of this alterations, since it replaces the classical notion of "commodity" in the logic of these new business models within financial economics.
HTC
History, Theory, Criticism
Thesis Seminar
Christina Condak
Seminar MArch
The Thesis Seminar offers seminars and guidance for independent student research, which should result in the comprehensive development of a thesis proposal. The course provides general instruction in the definition, programming and development of a thesis project. Students will prepare their thesis proposals by specifically defining a question, developing a working knowledge of related research in that field, and producing an architectural hypothesis. The collected work of the seminar will provide the necessary materials for the subsequent semester’s design experimentation, testing, critical appraisal of the hypothesis and eventual thesis project. The thesis argument will ultimately couple the specific resolution of an architectural proposition with the response to a larger question within architectural discourse.
GLC
Geography, Landscapes, Cities
Mappings
Antje Lehn
Seminar MArch2
The focus of this course is to discuss historical and contemporary cartography and mapping as tools to describe and understand spatial patterns and forms of organization in society at large. It gives an introduction to intensive and extensive cartography, as well as issues related to topology, topography and city planning.
All Platforms
Christina Condak / Lisa Schmidt-Colinet
Thesis Documentation
Seminar MArch
The course focuses on the representation and documentation of the thesis project. It challenges the students to develop their theses through a continuous process of oral articulation, writing, drawing and documenting, and enables them to formulate and structure their proposals. As the final synthesis of the graduation project, students submit their thesis documentation in the form of a book putting forward their thesis. It presents their hypotheses and methodology, includes research materials, the process of production and documentation of the final thesis project.
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MArch
Courses
Damjan Minovski
Seminar
Camera, Light, Photography and Video for Architecture Students II We will create and work with 3D scans, analyze and apply techniques borrowed from the film, vfx and game industry. Furthermore, we will establish a solid foundation on the topics of image synthesis, pointcloud/image/video capture and physics of lights and materials.
Werner Van Hoeydonck
Geometry II
Seminar BArch
Connections in space Descriptive geometry may seem antiquated due to computers’ ability to capture space in perfect renderings. Unsurprisingly, an architect’s ability to communicate space by means of artistic, sensitive, freehand perspectives opening up the observer’s imagination has become a rare and sought-after skill. Architectural education in fundamental geometrical principles – whether hand-drawn or mouse-clicked – will always be crucial for any formal expression. Geometry is not only the abstract constructive framework of both microcosm and macrocosm, but also the catalyst of humankind’s endeavour to express its fascination with spatial connections in buildings and ornamental art. Geometry again provides essential combinatorial spatial possibilities culminating in the fascinating world of poly-hedrons, their intrinsic relationships and transformational, combinatorial potential offer an interesting area of study, providing reference points for understanding and studying space and shapes. We will focus this year (apart from a whole range of topics concerning basic knowledge in descriptive geometry and patterns in architecture) on polyhedral sculpting. We will select well-suited building blocks from the families of the Platonic, Archimedean, Catalan and Johnson solids, alongside with some special, not so well-known solids and aggregate them to a Gestalt, an appealing composition expressing, in an abstract way, an idea, a feeling, a figure, an animal etc. Seizing and transforming these highly symmetric solids in accurate drawings and 3D models (digital and hand-made) enables us to probe unexplored shapes and spaces, connecting what was previously geometrically unconnected.
Aristide Antonas
Ruptured Landscapes
Lecture Series Seminar
The course accompanies the lecture series, preparing conversations with the speakers and editing the results. The preparation includes readings of their works and the editing concludes a systematic approach on the condition of urgency as an intellectual frame of practical thinking. Different traditions and disciplines will be examined in relation to the typologies of these urgencies and to possible ways how to deal with them.
Electives
25
Nicole Pruckermayr
Peacekeeping in the City… Peace and gender in public urban space
Seminar Gender Studies
Public urban space is profoundly gendered and a site of conflict. The different people who move in public space share, structure and form it with their actions and identity strategies (Goffman 1963). Peaceful action is only possible with each other, in exchange. Human rights belong to every human being. They are universal, indefeasible and undividable. Gender dichotomy and heteronormativity are inscribed in the urban surface. Women*, queer identities, and individuals who do not conform to the norm (= male, able-bodied, young, white, among others) are accordingly misrepresented and underrepresented (Halberstam 2005) in the »tyranny of dichotomy« (Broad 2010). In this course, we examine and resist this tyranny, asking: what signs and messages do public space and its actor:s send, what can gender-sensitive participation in the production of space look like, what role do human rights play? What can be peace-building?
Paula Strunden
Female Pioneers in the History of Virtual Reality (VR)
Seminar
While the metaverse is becoming one of the buzziest words in technology, we will revisit its lesser-known history, including many women who made significant contributions to the VR field. By tracing the line back to the first peak of the industry that took place in the 1990s, and that is largely ignored by today’s architectural discourse regarding immersive technologies, this seminar explores the seminal research of female VR pioneers in engineering fields, arts, and design. The stories of Carolina Cruz-Neira, Char Davies and Brenda Laurel, will be followed by contemporary practitioners who work with VR as multimedia artists today. The lines traced between these women aim to construct new perspectives on VR’s historical context and reframe the contemporary debate revolving around the metaverse to discuss: (a) What VR can bring to the architectural discourse and its practices of envisioning, designing, and building places? and (b) What can architecture bring to the VR discourse and its conception of embodiment, immersion, and presence?
27–28 Doctoral Studies 29 Research Projects 30–31 Lecture Series: Ruptured Landscapes 32 Calendar / Student Assistants / Labs
Doctoral Studies
Further information on the program: ika.akbild.ac.at/school/admission/ Dr_techn
For queries concerning There is the program, please contact: no application arch@akbild.ac.at deadline and no admission fee.
Architecture, as a discipline situated between the Arts and Sciences, finds itself in a unique position. Even if classified as scientific program of study by statute, the design process and therefore creative-artistic thinking forms the core of its education, thus architecture cannot be understood solely as an applied science. Architecture cannot be considered as a purely artistic discipline either since its practice involves a wide range of scientific aspects that require a rational-analytic and/or interpretive approach. These aspects are prerequisites to, as much as immanent societal obligations of the discipline. Making research visible by means of a PhD program at the IKA emphasises the particular position of the discipline. This has given rise to a distinctive, highly original, concept of research which allows for both strict scientific research
formats – i.e. within the field of architectural history or material technology – and artistic research at the intersection of design practice. Consequently, Doctoral theses may include and focus on theoretical, historical, technical as well social themes. Additionally, Design based research equally qualifies as a research path. The IKA has offered a doctorate study program in architecture (Dr. Techn.) since 2011 which is open to students holding an appropriate university degree in architecture (master, diploma). Candidates who wish to apply for the program are required to write a synopsis of their proposed dissertation project and are encouraged to approach a professor at the institute who could act as a supervisor for their intended doctoral thesis. Once a supervisor is found the program normally stretches over six semesters.
Doctoral Studies
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Current candidates at IKA Anamarija Batista ›Krise‹ als Denkfigur und Ihre Manifestation im städtischen Raum: Ein Blick auf die künstlerische, architektonische und urbane Praxis.
Jae Hyun Lim Synthetic History: Unmasking the History of Tange and Isozaki.
(supervisors: Diedrich Diederichsen, Angelika Schnell)
Paula Strunden Simulating Atmospheres: Digitizing embodied design and decision-making processes in architecture.
Sony Devabhaktuni Dancing Through Architecture: The Impact of Collaboration in Practice. (supervisor: Angelika Schnell)
Nikolaus Ettel The Architectural Parallels, Film-making as investigation method for urban oddities. (supervisor: August Sarnitz)
Adam Hudec Epidermitecture: An exploration of the potential of the facades outermost skin. How patina, the shallow layer of deposits on their surface can be of benefit to the building and its environment. (supervisors: Michelle Howard, Katja Sterflinger)
Waltraud Indrist 5 Häuser. 5 Familien. 5 Freundschaften – Der photographische Akt im Werk des Architekten Hans Scharoun zwischen 1933 und 1945. (supervisor: Angelika Schnell)
Solmaz Kamalifard A Study of Natural Lighting in Interior Spaces as a Human-Space Interaction Stimulus. (supervisor: Michelle Howard)
Bertan Koyuncu Re-reading Henri Lefebvre Through Inside and Outside the Refugee Camps in Lesvos. (supervisor: Angelika Schnell)
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Doctoral Studies
(supervisor: Angelika Schnell)
(supervisor: Angelika Schnell; part of research project Communities of Tacit Knowledge)
Mara Trübenbach A Loom’s Influence: Handcraft and the Role of Contemporary Aesthetic Education in British Architecture. (supervisor: Tim Anstey, Oslo School of Architecture; second supervisor: Angelika Schnell; part of research project Communities of Tacit Knowledge)
Research Projects Communities of Tacit Knowledge Architecture and its Ways of Knowing 2020–2023 Angelika Schnell Eva Sommeregger Paula Strunden Mara Trübenbach
Ambivalences of Modernity The architect and city planner Roland Rainer between Dictatorship and Democracy 2022–2024 Angelika Schnell Ingrid Holzschuh Waltraud Indrist Monika Platzer (Architekturzentrum Wien) Susanne Rick FWF – Austrian Science Fund / Stand-Alone Project ( P34938-G )
EU Horizon 2020 (860413) Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks
Unstable Bodies 2021–2023 Wolfgang Tschapeller Christian Freude (TU Wien) Christina Jauernik Johann Lurf Fabian Puttinger Rüdiger Suppin Vicki Kirby (University of New South Wales) Thomas Lamarre (University of Chicago)
IKA Research Evening 22 May 2023
FWF – Austrian Science Fund / PEEK (AR574)
RAUMPARK VIENNA A research project on an ecological megastructure for the city in times of the New Climatic Regime 2022–2023 Hannes Stiefel Luciano Parodi Stepan Nesterenko Florian Berrar Christina Ehrmann Christopher Gruber Funded by B+C Vienna, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Research Projects
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Lecture Series
Ruptured Landscapes
GLC Geography Landscapes Cities curated by Aristide Antonas
Lectures take place Anne Lacaton at IKA, R211a Schillerplatz James Bridle at 7pm Lucia Pietroiusti
Voices from architecture and arts present their point of view on the concept of urgency in relation to its impact on theory and praxis: within the discourse on »global warming«, we observe the stabilisation of a grand narrative that is becoming increasingly powerful and accepted as legitimate; it arises from the primacy of a human fault (or even of a human »sin«, to immediately affirm the theological scale of this discourse), and it is understood differently each time, in the context of what we conceive as »nature« and »natural«. The process of stabilization runs in parallel with post-colonial literature and parts of feminist writings underlying the importance of a destabilised normality even in the most trivial, accepted natural observations. While we cannot really enter into its important details in simple dialectical ways, the presence of a scientific discourse breaks with a critical and deconstructive tradition usually running counter
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Lecture Series
to hegemonic discourses. In other words, there is now supposedly a privileged hegemonic discourse that we tend to agree is considered unchallengeable; it presents itself with theological force, for some definitions of »nature«. Geography, as a complex way of framing different types of countryside and urban fields, is addressed in this exact frame of the omnipresent issue of global warming. Global warming—considered as a new grand narrative—is presented as a metaphysical scheme able to belong to a new religious constellation of science, already described in past epistemology. The empowerment of this discourse is presented together with the necessity of »acting urgently«; while urgency is often linked to an end of investigations, this lecture series investigates the possibilities of urgent but well-balanced political thought. The new frame of action becomes increasingly threatening
and disorienting as regards the type of inquiries held on the topic, and the constitution of any possible critique of their scientific results. Nevertheless, a non-homogeneous technical power alone seems in a position to organize the horizon of any human response to global warming. In this poisoned setting—that necessarily leads to an unquestioned aristocracy of science driving any actions for »reversing global warming and its discontents«—the role of the university appears boycotted. It seems that there is no room left for critical thinking, while an anonymous technical and scientific power appears to be the only actor able to assume the responsibility to act; but could that ever happen in the name of the people, and for their sake? It is true that a political engagement for action on the urgent issue of global warming seems trapped in this impasse; a problem of democracy seems to be intrinsic to the structure of
this type of scientific discourse. It is only on a technical level that we might be able to raise our voices about options to be heard, and maybe discussed and decided. Furthermore, the production of a field of urgency cannot drive a single scientific proposal. In this difficult frame of urgency, the policies left to debate seem impotent and restricted; any critique that may be voiced in this respect can be excluded in advance because of its incompatibility with the scientific understanding of the processes inscribed in the field of investigation. In a Foucaultian sense, the discourses held in this frame can only refer to a set of knowledge epistemologically excluded from the critical discourses that traditionally took place at universities. Can these displaced critical discourses still form a background, and reposition a political scenography at a distance from increasingly unreachable science?
Lecture Series
31
IKA Calendar
Summer 2023
Studios / Thesis Thesis presentation 14 March Thesis salon 17 April Thesis presentation 24 April Midterm reviews 8 – 9 May Thesis 2 / 3 15 May Thesis presentation 12 June Final reviews 19 – 20 June Diploma exhibition 20 – 30 June Award ceremony 30 June
Plotter / Paper Moritz Schafschetzy Archive / Photography Roxane Seckauer Lasercutter / 3D Plotter / Milling Jonathan Moser Lecture Setup / Lecture Documentation Paul Böhm
CAD Lab Render Machines, Monitors, Software Damjan Minovski
Media Lab
Lecture Series Anne Lacaton James Bridle Lucia Pietroiusti
Cave virtual environment with projections on three walls, stage truss for mounting additional hardware, VR capable workstation, room scale VR tracking Damjan Minovski
Model Workshop Analogue
Events Hitze Book Launch tba David Gissen Book Presentation Research Evening 22 May
Student Assistants
6 March
Procedural development and implementation of spatial structures by using woodworking machines: circular saws, band saw, planer, pillar drill, veneer press, hand tools Günther Dreger / Rüdiger Suppin Mon–Fri 2 pm–6 pm
Model Workshop Digital Interpretation of digital structures into physical prototypes using computeraided output devices: portal milling machine, laser cutters, 3D printers (powder / resin), thermoformer Günther Dreger / Rüdiger Suppin Mon–Fri 2pm–6pm
Contact Matriculation deadline 13 February – 31 March Course registration deadline 20 February – 31 March
d.minovski@akbild.ac.at g.dreger@akbild.ac.at r.suppin@akbild.ac.at