In this studio, we invite you to bring your fascinations, passions, burning questions, and experience to an engagement with cutting-edge architectural discourse. It is designed for those who want to develop strong theoretical positions and sophisticated architecture; it is especially recommended for those seeking the intellectual skills to start their own practice in the future. This is an advanced architecture studio, recommended for those progressing into their thesis in the following term, although participation is open to all interested students.
This summer semester, we are interested in how architecture might embrace an ongoing epochal shift: a dissolution of the categories that once clearly separated architecture from infrastructure and ecology. We invite you to develop radically hybridized architectures that blur the boundaries between inside and outside, a river and a shower, a kitchen and a forest, a church and a reservoir, or a fire station and a Wassermenschen palace.
At the heart of this blurring of boundaries is an increasing failure of modern architecture, infrastructure, and property to protect the survival and flourishing of life—and, more importantly, the possibility to experiment with and enjoy it. Nowhere is this more pressing than in the domain of water.
Dominant contemporary architecture has, in the most fundamental ways, evolved out of questions of security—whether bodily, relational, psychological, or existential. We refer to these contemporary forms of built reality as “security architecture” because their form and logic are rooted in increasingly expert-designed measures for protection: from disease, structural collapse, the social mediation of conflict, or the production of disciplined bodies (human and beyond).
However, the term “security” is rooted in the Latin sēcūritās—from se- (without) and cūra (care). Security thus refers to a condition of being without care: without concern, without obligation, and without the need for ongoing attentiveness or negotiation. It refers to a condition of relegating protection—and the negotiation with the people and things we depend upon—to architectural typologies, walled subdivisions, infrastructures, algorithms, and experts. This has resulted in an increasingly technocratic and mechanistic understanding of the world.
In a regime of securitization, modern data and protection infrastructures run what is almost a “protection racket.” They promise security from floods, fire, disease, and the “other,” claiming to quell the loss of boundaries that once made the self, family, nation, or the human and Nature circumscribable and controllable realities. Of course, they ultimately produce the very threats they claim to protect us from: ecological, economic, social, and political crises.
At the core of the failure of this dominant security architecture is the fact that it separates bodies, beings, and things in ways that stifle experimentation and the uniqueness of individual lives. This separation leads to a lack of sympathy and reciprocation for the needs and limits of the entities we depend upon, such as land, water, and their ecologies.
But bodies once separated—whether human, bacterial, fungal, or infrastructural—are starting to seek intimacy with one another again. We will work in and around Vienna, focusing on the “daylighting” of streams (Bäche), the renaturing of rivers, and the flood retention and diversion infrastructure inherent to these projects.
Far from being merely infrastructural or ecological tasks relegated to the modern abstractions of a “universal knowable Nature” or neutral technology separate from culture or religion, we view these projects as radically cultural and cosmological. They too often hide or ignore the fact that they involve a plurality of modes of seeing, knowing, and building; they offer a unique opportunity to open up a new, experimental Viennese architecture.
Whenever we, as architects, work with a renaturing or infrastructural project, we have the possibility to render it as the explicitly cultural and cosmological architecture that it is. How can architecture invite an ongoing negotiation with the rhythms and limits of everyone it affects—remaining radically hybrid, plural, intimate, and open to continuous experimentation. You might finally ask yourself: how might a daylit, rewilded Bach and water retention basin become a giant public kitchen and subtly, a temple to Wassermenschen? Or how might a forest-edge reservoir become a bathhouse pilgrimage station to St. Nepomuk?
Teaching Methods:
Learning is structured around a series of micro-briefs—short design prompts or exercises. Students will begin working in groups and may later transition to individual projects, depending on preference.
Design work is developed through fieldwork, in-depth typological research, drawings, and models at various scales.Students will also engage in text-based work, producing a glossary and a short piece of writing that will form the basis of the final presentation. Teaching takes place through weekly group or one-to-one tutorials, workshops, and guest critic roundtables.
Lecturers:
Wilfried Kuehn
María Páez González
Brendon Carlin
Tutor:
Flora Struber
Further information:
Kick-off: Thu, 5th of March 2026, White Cube, Forschungsbereich Raumgetsaltung und Entwerfen
Meetings will take place every Thursday.
This design studio will be held in English.