This design studio will look into the ways tourists shape the city, and will speculate on new spaces, rituals, and tools to read the city in ways that are contextual, multilayered, and non-extractive. It will include an excursion to Matera with the Milan-based studio SPACE CAVIAR, the artistic director of the Matera Capital of Culture project, who will show us their various interventions in the city. In Vienna, we will meet with the curators of the AzW exhibition “Über Tourismus” (opening March 21st), which explores the role of architecture in rethinking more sustainable paths to urban tourism.The course methodology includes photography, filmmaking, drawing and mapping as both analytical and propositional tools.
Tourists don’t see the city as it is. They gaze upon the world through a lens that is framed by their heightened expectations. In search of experiences that differ from their daily life, tourists see various elements (natural and man-made) as signifiers of other things they hope to find, document, and share on their journey. Travel agencies, navigation apps, guidebooks and local experts—agents who mediate the relationship between the tourist and the city—make their living by refining, enhancing, and valorising its symbolic elements for mass consumption. This condition has been exacerbated in the last decade with the rise of social media and the reduction of the city’s complexity into a flattened image of itself. Tourists move across the city on another layer than its inhabitants; they often use different modes of transportation, consume goods catered to their needs, and read its streets, plazas, and public buildings using a vocabulary of guidebooks. This palimpsest obstructs the real city, leaving it below its own fabricated image that was designed to satisfy the touristic gaze rather than accommodate the evolving needs of its citizens.
To study this phenomenon, the studio will visit the Italian city of Matera, a city of stone caves and ancient history. Formerly one of the poorest cities in Italy, Matera’s economy was revived thanks to public interest in its historic fabric, resulting in its designation in 1993 under the UNESCO World Heritage and as the European Capital of Culture in 2019. Today, tourist agencies, hotels, and galleries have appeared in its stone houses, pushing local residents out, while initiatives such as “The Open Design School” attempt to negate the effect of a temporary surge in tourism over the city.
Our visit to Matera will be guided by Space Caviar, artistic directors of the Capital of Culture project. This includes a tour their interventions in the city—its various caves and ancient homes— as well as their experimentation with the archives of Basilicata, exploring how archives and collections can be understood as living entities through which the stratified complexity of a region’s history and culture can be interpreted.
The studio will also include meetings with the curators of the Az W exhibition “Über Tourismus” (opening March 21st), which speculates on the ways in which tourism can be more climatically, culturally and spatially responsible, and thus refrain from destroying what it thrives on. The curators will give us a tour of the exhibition and attend the midterms and final reviews as guests critics.
Teaching methods
Students in this studio will then offer a rereading of Vienna’s heritage. Learning from the excursion to Matera and from studies of other cities in Europe, they will present drawings, photographs and videos of Vienna’s tourist sites and propose a new lens through which the city could be consumed. In particular, we will focus on designing new spaces, rituals, or tools to read the city in ways that are contextual, multilayered, and non-extractive.
Lecturers
Wilfried Kuehn
Gili Merin
Sofia Belenky
Additional information
Video Introduction:
https://portal.tuwien.tv/View.aspx?id=10828~5g~7ONdMYOGdB
Kick-Off: Tue, 5th of March 2024, 10.00 a.m.
Projektraum RG- 4/253, Hauptgebäude (Karlsplatz 13) – Stiege 7
The semester will be taught in English. Meetings weekly on Tuesday 10:00 – 15.00.
The semester will include an excursion to Matera with Space Caviar.
Travel to Matera, Italy. 18 – 21 March. Group flight to Bari (with Ryan Air) on the 18th of March but students are free to arrive earlier. Travel has to be organized independently!
Accommodation is paid for individually but will be organised by the school. Participation is obligatory for the design participants. More details see LVA 253.K96 Excursion Matera.