Archipelagos II

Archipelagos is a three-term studio focused on the intersection between architecture and infrastructure, particularly on learning and thinking with water. Studio projects explore the possibility of ‘islands’ where a distinct relationality between us and that which we need for our survival and happiness can occur. This is what Isabelle Stengers would describe as cosmopolitics: a politics in which cosmos refers to the unknown constituted by multiple, divergent worlds, and to the articulation through which they might eventually become capable of coexisting.
In the exhibition, you will see five projects working with waterscapes in and around Vienna: the Danube River, Neusiedler See, and three of Vienna’s rivers, either encased in concrete or hidden beneath pavement, the Wienfluss, Ottakringerbach, and Alsbach.
Students explored how architecture might manifest the river as a political body, or as a capricious one requiring forms of cultural mediation, security, and protection. Equally, the projects suggest that this relationality with water entails an expanded view of architecture and type: one that both alters and opens up technical objects to common forms of use and misuse.

Further Information
Archipelagos II