PRESENTATION AT EXPO 2020 DUBAI

March 2022, seemed an appropriate opportunity for a presentation event, with the physical presence of students, instructors, and guests.

Thanks to the generous availability of the Austrian and Swiss delegations at EXPO 2020 in Dubai, a full day experience at EXPO was arranged on 5th of January 2022, where students would have the opportunity to meet in person and present publicly their projects, at the presence of instructors and invited guests.

Due Covid-related restrictions in terms of maximum capability of people in enclosed spaces, the event was arranged in two-phases, with a welcome tour at the Austrian pavilion, where students had the opportunity to experience firsthand one of the most remarkable pavilions displayed at EXPO 2020, and then a conclusive projects’ presentations at the rooftop terrace of the Swiss pavilion.

The final online presentation of projects on 29th of November 2021, with participation of a rich panel of experts, concluded the experimental teaching and learning experience initiated at Abu Dhabi University with the Technical University of Vienna TU Wien.

However, we as instructors and the students as well, felt the need of more adequate conclusion of this first international collaboration and interuniversity experience, a conclusive event which would include the participation of an enlarged public.

After an entire semester necessarily experienced through distant learning, due geographical and pandemic reasons, the opportunity to meet in person for the first time was set as conclusive goal. In between the many side effects that Covid-19’s pandemic spread globally, the widening in physical proximity has been accompanied, paradoxically, by a tightening in social relations and cultural exchanges, even if virtually mediated. The coincidence with the EXPO 2020 in Dubai, forcibly postponed due the pandemic and opened to the public from 1st of October 2021 until 31st of ped by an ancient wisdom, the passive ventilation induced ect of natural daylight raining from atop the nerations. Hence, the event shifted to the neighbor Swiss tions would have been arranged in the events’ space at

The exquisite kindness and availability of Austrian staff lead students and guests in a memorable journey into the pavilion, designed by Querkraft Architekten as a sequence of timeless spaces, a mystic place where different cultures meet spatially and sensorially, and the overarching sustainability concept translates physically into a combination of vernacular forms and reassuring materials.

Designed by the architecture fi rm OOS, the Swiss pavilion welcomes its visitors with a giant recessed mirror façade displaying the red-white national flag, which is in real the reflection of an immense walkable red carpet leading to the main entrance.

In fact, “reflections” is the dominant concept here, evoked through the dematerialized surface of the pavilion inducing reflections between nature and artifice, past and future, art and technology, mountain’s breathtaking panoramas and dystopic cityscapes.

The stereometric, apparently impenetrable shape introverts a cinematic ascensional experience, an experiential promenade which starts in the darkness of an early morning mist of a piedmont valley and rise along a trail to reach the mountain top, with the sunlight as a reward.

The presentation at the rooftop of this almost alienlike mirror cube, seemed the perfect conclusion for this educational journey, initiated as an experiment between two distant universities, combining in mixed workgroups students of the most disparate nationalities and cultural backgrounds, challenging on an advanced topic which is constantly developing, and in a time of forced seclusion which will be remembered globally for decades to come.

Overall, we could say without any doubt that the scope of this first collaboration has been reached: participating ADU and TUW students have been introduced to a new advanced aspect of design and fostered to delve and research into, invited to think critically figuring out original alternative approaches out of the box, and encouraged to think about sustainability not as an accrual of abstract principles ready-to-use, but as an ethical approach to the living environment, with the hope for a possible future both on earth as well as in space.

In retrospect, the EXPO itself represented the perfect stage to present the design experiment between ADU and TUW during the Fall semester 2021/2022, in a place which is collecting an array of contrasting flavors being combined into an extraordinary new taste, hosting a collection of concepts variously listed within the message of connecting people and minds, temporarily concentrated into a transitional space which would evolve into something else at the end or simply given back to its previous ordinary function.

This character of impermanence, constant evolution, further transformation, disaggregation, and reinterpretation maybe is marrying perfectly with the experimental message and quintessence of the habitats which Space Architecture prefigures, necessarily impermanent through time, continuously adapting to a challenging, dynamic, and extreme environment.