This year, the Archipelagos and Cosmopolitics studio will continue research into how architecture can take the side of, and bolster, emerging practices concerned with the reenchantment and regeneration of our relationship to waterscapes in crisis in and around Vienna—from kitchen sinks, to rivers long buried and hidden in concrete culverts beneath traffic, museums, and markets, to clouds and springs in the surrounding mountains and forests.
Given time, water dissolves everything that tries to contain it. An architecture that thinks with water becomes both more fluid and more grounded in an immediacy of lived relationships. Water and water crises confound abstract categories—politics, culture, nature, infrastructure, and domesticity begin to blur. Previously separated architectural scales collapse, and everything from the private shower to the city block, and entire watersheds and mountain ranges, becomes a single architecture. Distinctions between the rhythms of our bodies, rivers, plants, animals, and the city dissolve.
Until the Middle Ages, the people inhabiting what is now Vienna lived within a constantly shifting alluvial plain composed of hundreds of islands and vast wetland landscapes. Their selective use of the floodplain—avoiding permanent settlement within it—reveals a sophisticated architecture of hydrosocial knowledge and practice that respected and negotiated with the river’s rhythms. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, economic and industrial speculation and expansion at the centre of the Empire saw Vienna’s floodplains crowded and paved over, exposing inhabitants to the increasing risk of flood events. Numerous smaller rivers and brooks, including the Wienfluss (Vienna River), were increasingly made to clean out the city’s sewage, industrial waste, and stormwater, and pandemics of waterborne disease broke out. Thus, the Danube and many of Vienna’s brooks were straightened, de-islanded, canalised, covered, and diverted underground for control.
‘Grey’ infrastructural interventions meant convenience but produced a technopolitical distancing from essential relationships of care for flourishing water. Today, mounting social, ecological, political, and psychic crises are, at their core, water crises. More precisely, they are crises of dispossession from intimate, direct relationships of dependency on, and care for, watery rhythms, things, and beings.
Yet river and brook movements in Vienna are opening up other ways of imagining and practicing architecture. The ProBach project aims to resurrect Vienna’s rivers and brooks amidst the increasing impacts of socio-climatic crisis in the city. Lobau Bleibt deployed clear, recognisable, and joyful architectures to protect Danube ecologies from further destruction and incarceration by technocratic grey infrastructure. Activists co-constructed an experimental architecture of daily life grounded in the protection of the river, turning what were once categorically separated and exclusionary spaces of ‘Nature’ and technical infrastructure into cultural and political platforms for experiments in commoning domestic (kitchens, bathing, sleeping, dining) and cultural spaces (libraries, music, art spaces). Through river parades and swimming events, Schwimmverein Donaukanal has subtly suggested that Vienna might more radically transform grey, technocratic infrastructures into platforms for reenchantment, politics, culture, and direct relational immersion with long-alienated, silenced, and hidden waters.
Teaching methods:
This semester, students will propose Viennese Waterscape Assemblies that operate at several scales simultaneously: from microbes, to animal, plant, and human bodies, to the building and block, to the watershed and territory, spanning both ‘city’ and ‘nature.’ Projects will learn from, and deepen, existing movements for hydrocommons, and the resurfacing, re-embodying, and reenchantment of watery relations.
Lecturers:
Wilfried Kuehn
Brendon Carlin
María Páez González
Further Information:
Kick-off: Thu, October 2nd, 2025, 10am in White Cube.
Meetings will take place every thursday between 10am–6pm.
This Course will be entirely in english!