URBAN REPAIR
The sustainable further development of the existing city for future urban use includes, among other things, the situational repair of established structures. Places outside the realm of everyday attention can become potential locations for the city of tomorrow by rebuilding and interweaving existing urban morphologies. A new perspective on the existing situation gives rise to models for new forms of the city of the 21st century.
As a method of urban repair, the typology of urban transplants is to be examined by designs. Based on existing urban typologies from different eras, implants are generated that are placed in relation to the potential locations in the fragmented morphology of the city. Under the premise of the equivalence of building structures and interstitial spaces, urban spaces are examined and developed that are interwoven with existing urban structures and at the same time reveal independent, contemporary forms of spatial urbanity.
The tense relationship between buildings and urban outdoor spaces creates the dense European city with the help of building elements such as walls, windows, and entrances as thresholds between inside and outside, as well as carefully designed spaces between the buildings. Two elements deserve special attention: The first element is the space-forming façade in its ambiguity of content: as a climate-regulating shell and threshold, as a mediator between public and private space, as an expression of a building structure. The second element is the urban open space: defined by surface materiality, topography, and vegetation. Investigative design explores the careful relationship between building structures and open spaces as the key to transforming cities into climate-resilient and user-oriented spaces.
CASE STUDY: NEU-MARX CULTURAL DISTRICT
Since the 19th century, the urban space between Rennweg and Erdbergstrasse on the border between Vienna’s 3rd and 11th districts has been characterized by infrastructure uses for the growing metropolis: cattle market and slaughterhouse (1846–1997), central gasworks gasometer (1889–1970), Southeast Tangent urban motorway (1977), U3 underground line (1991), Vienna International Bus Terminal (2007), and many more.
In terms of urban morphology, these large structures have shaped the urban space, which has been undergoing transformation for decades, to this day. Since the end of the 1990s, the formerly peripheral location in the city layout has developed from an inner border to a significant urban interface between the 3rd and 11th districts. On both sides of the tangent, the former commercial and manufacturing character is being transformed by residential, office, educational, media, sports, and, last but not least, cultural uses. Since these transformations are being planned without an overarching concept for the urban SPACE, a morphological situation has arisen that is characterized by lacking heterogeneity.
In the integrative design course in the winter semester, we will examine strategies for repairing this heterogeneous urban SPACE in spatial terms through selective structural interventions. The aim is to achieve an urban morphological repair of the usage-related scale jumps in the urban fabric, which rearticulates the urban space through individual, precisely placed urban building blocks and serves as a model for contemporary urbanity in the context of usage and climate resilience in construction.
Teaching Methods:
Based on a strategy of reparative transformation of the urban spatial situation, the open space potential of the existing situation will be examined and placed in the context of the question of consumption-free public space for all and the future requirements of climate resilience in the city. The concept development will be based on a precise urban morphological analysis of the existing situation and the reading and description of significant elements and traces in the urban space.
Development of action-oriented documentation on a new practice for dealing with urban space and transport infrastructure and on sustainable repair strategies in the existing urban fabric.
Conceptual and working models are used to approach the existing surrounding urban space and its spatial sequences of outdoor space, infrastructure, and buildings, as well as between public and private spaces. The urban planning interfaces and the limiting facades are examined equivalently.
Lecturers:
Wilfried Kuehn
Ulrich Huhs
Eldar Hajdarević
Maria Auböck
János Kárász
Peter Bauer
further information:
Kick-off: Thu, October 2nd, 2025, at 10am in Ersatzraum CA0322, Gußhausstraße 27–29, with a short excursion to the site after the kick-off (2pm–6pm).
Meetings will be every thursday 10am–6pm.