Students will work across scales: from kitchen sinks, showers, drains, fountains and public baths, to buried brooks, the Wienfluss, the Donaukanal, weirs, retention basins, wetlands, reservoirs, forests, clouds, and mountain springs. When taps stop magically producing clean, cheap water, the kitchen, bathroom, street, canal, forest, reservoir, and watershed become visible as part of a single territorial architecture in crisis.
The course introduces infrastructure as infrastructuring: a continuous, experimental spatial and material politics of co-creation, maintenance, shared enjoyment, and shared vulnerability. Infrastructure is not treated as a fixed asset to be secured, but as a set of heightened forums and situations through which relations of dependency are negotiated, repaired, governed, ritualised, and reassembled.
Through fieldwork, mapping, typological and anthropological research, drawings, models, writing, and material testing, students will identify a specific infrastructural-water-ecological condition in or around Vienna and trace the territorial, ecological, legal, technical, and cultural systems that make it possible. They will translate this research into a precise act of infrastructuring that makes hidden relations visible, inhabitable, negotiable, and open to collective transformation.
Projects may engage buried streams, fountains, weirs, baths, reservoirs, flood landscapes, public laundries, forest springs, or river edges, asking how maintenance, governance, ritual, enjoyment, repair, and use can become architectural form.
Methods:
Teaching is structured through a sequence of micro-briefs that move from collective fieldwork to individual or group design development. Students identify water-infrastructural and ecological situations in and around Vienna, then trace their territorial, technical, legal, cultural, and more-than-human relations through mapping, typological research, anthropological observation, drawing, model-making, writing, and material testing. Weekly tutorials, workshops, and guest critic roundtables support the translation of research into architectural briefs and one-to-one interventions. The studio treats design as research by design: propositions are developed, tested, documented, and discussed as acts of infrastructuring that make hidden dependencies visible, negotiable, inhabitable, and open to collective transformation.
Lecturers:
Brendon Carlin
María Páez González
Tutor:
Andreea Avram
Further information:
Kick-off: Fri, 2nd of October 2026, White Cube, Forschungsbereich Raumgestaltung und Entwerfen
Meetings will take place every Thursday.
This design studio will be held in English.