3 Change of Direction

Mid of the semester, our project development changed drastically as we figured, that the planned project partnership for a participartory project in Neuperlach, Munich wouldn’t be possible to continue. From here we had to look for a new theme and partnership which could become the basis for another semester project. As we were working on a project called Cool Islands by Dr. Inês Dantas at the chair of Architectural Design and Participation, we figured it could become an interesting change of direction for our semester.

The theme looks into the issues the city of Munich is facing due to climatic changes, which lead to so called heat-islands and thereby accelerate urban heat effects affecting health and well-being as well as the cities environment. Since those urban heat effects continue to have more and more negative effects on the cities development, the design challenge fort he cool-islands project, was to design strategies that could offer places to citizens, animals or plants to regenarate and help to positively affect the overall cooling network of the city. With that design challenge in mind, we developed a new concept to use AR or VR tools to make the affect of climate change in the city visible and perceptible to a participant. By adapting our time frame and concept board, we were able to create a new time frame and have our goal and steps towards it in clear sight.

Our main goal within this new topic, became the challenge of creating a dystopian to apocalyptic vision of the city of Munich, which we called Munich’s Burning. Within this vision, cool islands in the city would start popping up and showing the network of cool islands which could eventually help preventing the then nearly inevitable.