STADTIMPLANTAT
The sustainable development of the existing city for future urban use is based on the situational repair of grown structures. Places outside of everyday attention can become potential places for the city of tomorrow through the conversion and interweaving of existing urban morphologies. New perspectives on the existing create models for new forms of the city of the 21st century.
The typology of the urban implant is to be examined and designed as a method of urban repair. On the basis of 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 and interstice, urban spaces are examined and developed that are interwoven with existing urban structures and at the same time demonstrate independent, contemporary forms of spatial urbanity.
The dense European city is the product of the dynamic relationship between buildings and urban exterior spaces, with the help of building elements such as walls, windows and entrances as thresholds between inside and outside, as well as carefully designed surfaces between buildings. Two elements deserve special attention: the first is the space-forming façade in its substantial ambiguity: as a climate-regulating shell and threshold, as a mediator between public and private space, and as an expression of a structure. The second element is the urban open space: determined by spatial quality as well as materiality, topography and planting. The research-based design investigates the careful relationship between buildings and open spaces as the key to the transformation to a climate-resilient and user-oriented city.
CASE STUDY: MOLKENMARKT BERLIN
The historic center of Berlin has been subject to a continuous process of transformation for centuries. The representational needs of the Baroque, the growth to a city of millions in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the destruction of large parts of the city center in World War II, and the system conflict during the period of division have allowed a multitude of urban models to become physical reality in an exemplary real-world laboratory of urban development. A wide range of urban typologies unexpectedly meet in the center. The area around the medieval Molkenmarkt is still a blank space in the city’s morphology. The site has been lost as a high-quality urban space due to war damage and the subsequent large-scale transformation of the traffic infrastructure in the form of a multi-lane thoroughfare. Since 1996, the Senate of Berlin has been working on repair concepts for this gap in the urban fabric, which are characterized by the premises of critical reconstruction (inner city plan) and the concept of the citizens’ city (Hoffmann-Axthelm).
In the integrative design in the summer semester, we will examine alternative strategies to these backward-looking urban ideas. We are looking for an urban-morphological networking of the fracture in the urban fabric that enters into an urban dialogue with the surrounding urban islands and at the same time serves as a model for contemporary urbanity in the context of resilience of use and climate in building.
Teaching Methods:
Based on the strategy of a reparative transformation of the urban situation, the open space potentials of the existing are examined and placed in the context of the question of non-consumptive public space for all as well as the future requirements of the city’s climate resilience. The basis for the concept development is a precise urban morphological analysis of the existing situation as well as the reading and description of the significant elements and traces in the urban space.
Development of action-oriented documentation for a new practice of dealing with urban space and transport infrastructure and for sustainable repair strategies in the urban space.
The approach to the existing, surrounding urban space and its spatial sequences of exterior space, infrastructure and buildings, as well as between public and private spaces, is carried out using concept and working models. The investigation of the urban interfaces and the bordering facades is carried out equivalently.
Lecturers:
Wilfried Kuehn
Peter Bauer
Ulrich Huhs
Alexander Garber
Maria Auböck
Janos Karasz
further information:
Kick-off: Fri, March 7th, 2025, 10am – 1pm, in Raumlabor, Hof 1.
Meetings every Friday between 10am and 6pm.
The semester includes an excursion to Berlin from 31.03. – 06.04.2025, arrival in Berlin, accommodation is to be planned individually. More details on LVA 253.M87 Exkursion Berlin.