EnergizingVienna: Soundscape Westbahnhof

ENERGIZING VIENNA Speculating on Inner-Urban-Densification

With special guest workshops on: Urban Design / Energy & Climate / Speculative Futures

The program foresees intense workshops with invited guests, guest lectures and reviews in a well balanced mix of integrating international and local knowledge to contribute to the studio research, feed-back and dialogue. The studio makes extensive use of engaging modeling technologies by various means: reflecting abstractions of reality within the ranges of analytical data to conceiving architectures as dynamic responsive systems, and building speculative designs and narrations for modeling alternative realties.

Topic: In regard to the persistent global population growth, and recent developments "Energizing Vienna" sets its goal to speculate on novel strategies for inner-urban densification, beyond well-received urban planning paradigms. Taking into account new technologies to incorporate feedback systems of evaluation in the design process, equipping built structures with the ability to control climate, or implementing adaptability to reacting to changing environmental conditions, radically alters the role of architecture in regard to the understanding of urban morphologies (the relation between urban physical infrastructures, the defined units - building and blocks – and, open spaces), incorporating the notion of time in multiple scales.

Scope: Vienna, with its19^th Century development, serves as the case study to reconsidering the relation between the architectural object and the urban fabric, with a special focus one time based strategies for future changes. Based on the hypothesis that Vienna could grow in density without acquiring new areas for development, the studio looks at the city as truly three-dimensional space of investigation, whereby the spatial and technological potential of the architectural expertise is considered as the driving force for alternative urban design strategies to explore the possibilities of undetected spaces for growth. In this regard, presumed direct or indirect causalities between ground and profit, accessibility and location, site and function, size and performance, space and program, community and social segments, are ultimately put into question. There must be alternatives to what we learned to think knowing.

Directed by Andrea Börner and Bernhard Sommer - Teaching: Anna Gulinska, Galo Moncayo