Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba, 8th century / 16th century; http://otraarquitecturaesposible.blogspot.com
A great architect once said that if you are serious about making something new, something transformative, you must work with what is already there in a different way. The truly new can only be a palimpsest of the old, established, and emerging Types.
The city is an artefact whose constantly changing forms are a register of common types of rituals and habits, which are otherwise experienced and enacted uniquely by individuals or collectives. Over the centuries, rituals and habits have crystallized into specific architectures, institutions, and types with characteristic elements, relationships, and formal aspects. Thus, types are larger than any individual life span or historical epoch, they change very slowly over time. When studied, the example and the type can make visible specific modes of power in the political, economic, and cultural. However, types do not determine function per se, and are also always in a state of transforming, adapting, merging, splitting, becoming, or perhaps, becoming obsolete. While we lack any fixed or destined way of living and architecture, transformation is always an art of the possible from within and against existing Types.
In the studio CITY PALIMPSEST, you will search for collective cultural ideas of activity that demand and create a specific form. By analysing the spatial frameworks as well as the canonical types these activities take place in, an archetypical spatial concept is extracted. This will then be applied as an adaptive reuse project in an existing building site in Vienna. Designed as a unique architecture the project thus juxtaposes the status quo with radical form, in order to propose a new Vienna type.
Supervisors
Wilfried Kuehn
Eldar Hajdarević
Brendon Carlin
Further information
The semester will be taught in English.
Kick-Off: Thur. 5th October 2023, 10.00 – 12.00 a.m., Hörsaal 14, Staircase 3, 3rd floor