IKA REVIEW WINTER 2019

INSTITUT FÜR KUNST UND ARCHITEKTUR

ADP ANALOGUE DIGITAL PRODUCTION CMT CONSTRUCTION MATERIAL TECHNOLOGY

www.akbild.ac.at/ika

ESC ECOLOGY SUSTAINABILITY CULTURAL HERITAGE

INSTITUTE REVIEW FOR ART WINTER AND 2019 ARCHITECTURE foundation blocks of the enriched soil, the secret weapon for the following semester’s undertaking.

CONSTRUCTION AND COMBUSTION CMT ESC Michelle Howard Christian Fröhlich Antonia Autischer Charlotte Beaudon Römer Marcella Brunner David Degasper Alice Hoffmann Felix Knoll Armin Maierhofer Lorenz Mang Nils Neuböck Lisa Prossegger Normunds Püne Moritz Schafschetzy Helena Schenavsky Julian Schönborn Sebastian Seib Matias Tapia Johannes Wiener Catherine Zesch Reviewers and guests Merritt Bucholz The Hochecker Family Adam Hudec Mortimer Müller Johannes Tintner-Olifier Harald Vacik

Burning Down the House I addresses HITZE in that it investigates fire and our ambiguous relationship with it. It also addresses the state of crisis that architects currently find themselves in – should we be accomplices of growth capitalism and continue to build wastefully as usual, or could we act and transform our profession? Could our path to a new equilibrium be cleared by burning down the house and sorting through the cinders, embers and ash?

Wildfires have consumed tracts of forest from the Amazon to the Arctic on an unprecedented scale. Our house is burning down, and the resulting massive forest clearings have unbridled HITZE. Forest clearings are central to Western theories on the origins of architecture, where a primitive tribe arrives in a clearing to find the trees that have fallen to make it. The parable invariably describes only two possible outcomes: they use the wood to build a shelter or to build a bonfire. This semester, we looked at other possibilities and took an unbiased journey through the phenomenon of wildfire. Using the tools of the architect, we looked closely, investigating and reconstructing its behaviour in the forest and in the city.

In a conscious effort of calibration between conjecture and activism, we embarked upon the step-by-step construction of soil using traceable and low impact production processes. Together with a collier family, we transformed wood into charcoal. → fig. 23-30 / p. 11 We constructed a composter and made humus. → fig. 1 / p. 5 These were the

We traced the paths of 18 Austrian forest wildfires using data provided by the Institute of Silviculture and information gathered by visiting the scene of each disaster, observing the fire’s traces, conducting interviews, and extracting soil and vegetation samples. Finally, we analysed it all using the tools of the architect. → fig. 5 / p. 6 Having gotten to know the forest wildfire, we used this in-depth knowledge to investigate fires in the city of Vienna and create projects that used the medium of the installation to relate what they had unearthed. Unearthing is the common thread running through these projects, from revealing the value of spaces that are the result of fire to the prying open of sealed ground. We began in the treetops and came down to the earth.

Michelle Howard, Christian Fröhlich Design Studio BArch1, BArch3, MArch Thanks to: The Hochecker Family, for their guidance and for allowing us to spend so much time with them in the construction of the traditional wood charcoal kiln; Johannes Tintner-Olifiers (BOKU, Institute of Physics and Materials Science) for revealing to us more clearly how interconnected forest ecosystems are; Harald Vacik and Mortimer Müller (BOKU, Institute of Silviculture) for generously providing us with detailed information on our forest fires, and for their patience in responding to our constant requests.

→ fig. 13 / p. 9 → fig. 38-39 / p. 14 → fig. 53 / p. 19

There are, probably in each generation, crucial moments where one suddenly becomes aware that it is unthinkable to go on as before. Generally, these unsettling events do not offer hints of another, different path that even seems to be a viable one.

Then again, what is viable in the face of the unprecedented transformative power of the ubiquitous New Climatic Regime 2?

RAUMPARK – Faux Terrain Vienna is the title of a balancing act over two academic terms, a walk on the edge between the worlds of HITZE facts and of HITZE antic­ipations. RAUMPARK initially follows HITZE. RAUMPARKS are climatic devices; they are constructions of various sizes, operating on diverse scales, offering multidimensional populated (inhabited) parks, gardens and (“wild”) forests in and above our cities. HITZE indeed challenges the very foundations upon which our cities (and societies) are built. Its impact fundamentally challenges our idea of a ground and our relation to it.

RAUMPARKS are descendants of a surprising liaison between megastructure concepts of the 20th century and an idea of a new type of urban wilderness. In our first testing stage, they proved to rely on existing (and anticipated) sociodemographic factors as well as on environmental constraints and promises.

They were tested as a discrete system of interventions, each focusing on partial aspects of HITZE in Vienna. Whereas, for example, cool environments where tested as visionary reformulations of the Danube Island, Vienna’s success model of a megastructure (1972-88), areal fight clubs were designed to manage rage in an embattled heated-up future.

Design Studio BArch1, BArch3, MArch

3 EXCERPTS FROM A WORK IN PROGRESS:

Maximilian Aelfers Olivia Ahn Florian Berrar Daniel Bracher Alexander Czernin Katharina Eder Christina Ehrmann Lucas Fischötter Elisabeth Fölsche Maximilian Gallo Burak Genc Alexander Groiss Christopher Gruber Jakob Jakubowski Ji Yun Lee George Mintas Jonathan Moser Maximilian Pertl Dana Radzhibaeva Ria Roberg Salome Schramm Johanna Syré Julia Wiesiollek

GLC GEOGRAPHY LANDSCAPES CITIES

present endless possibilities of richness in shape and use.

Reviewers and guests Kathrin Aste Andrea Börner Michael Hofstätter Georg Kolmayr Valerie Messini Johannes Porsch Thomas Proksch Thomas Romm

Hannes Stiefel, Luciano Parodi

CMT ESC Hannes Stiefel Luciano Parodi

HTC HISTORY THEORY CRITICISM

Landscape of healing and acting for a society of awareness proposes a way to cultivate the arts of living on a damaged planet, the challenging condition of heat included. The extent of ignorant, unconscious ways of behaving on this planet has triggered a fundamental change in the human mind. A radical shift in human culture has taken place: a symbiotic, deliberate way of life that is based on the awareness of coexistence.

Necessary to enable bodies to live for and with the conditions evoked and not against them, an elevated landscape is embedded in the previously existing urban environment – a landscape for living, healing and acting; an infrastructure that offers the necessary flexibility to be able to integrate the unknown and contra­ dictions; a network, constantly extended by its inhabitants to slowly repair the terrible damage once caused by their own species. Regular and irregular structures

To cool the city in the most efficient way, all permanently sealed surfaces in the city are torn open. Asphalt and concrete disappear to make room for a diverse ecosystem. Vegetation, forests, ponds, streams, animals and all kinds of creatures settle in these regained areas.

A vibrant wilderness spreads in all directions on the ground level, between the buildings of the city of Vienna.

The existing buildings are mostly used for residential housing. Private homes function as the interface between nature, which is outside the front door, and the artificial elevated landscape above the city. As part of their daily routine, inhabitants either wander in the forests on the ground or spend time in the maze of walks, pathways, platforms and buildings situated in the structure of the landscapes gently lifted towards the sky.

These intertwining layers are carefully woven with stories. Individuals of all sorts inhabiting this city are ultimately respon­ sible for the continuity of this most impor­tant task. The flow of informative imagi­ nation is the foundation, the wall, the pillar and the joint. To put this very spe­cial challenge into practice, the artificial landscape needs to offer various functions: structures for education and research, communal spaces, wells and gardens, all kinds of horizontal and vertical modules scanning the landscape and adapting to it.

Salome Schramm

→ fig. 15-19 / p. 10 About the logic of the vague: Yes or no?

Everything or nothing at all? True or false?

The answer is a spectrum, a ribbon that bends into infinity.

This RAUMPARK is an uncertain path.

It is changing, constantly adapting, responding to the context. It is a way of pushing out order so chaos can fill it, arbitrariness manifested in material means. So chance becomes visible. It is that which is not in the range of our influence, what makes us creative. The unreasonable causes sense.

This RAUMPARK challenges contextual thinking. It changes and adapts to the complex network of shifts within the city.

Human influence is limited, we see.

So implementations become local, in the way this RAUMPARK manifests dif­ ferently in this city, constantly responding to local circumstances.

This RAUMPARK evolves by using manmade noxious substances. It transforms them, binds them, solidifies them – not water to wine, but at least dust to rock.

So the untouchable becomes reachable.

It is a chance to work with what already exists all around. Some new forms of space may evolve.

This RAUMPARK combines artificiality and naturalness. By using technologically advanced methods, the unlikely unification of urban and rural space may become possible.

So space becomes available. Due to a massive expansion of useable area, there is no breeding ground for territorial claims.

This RAUMPARK reacts to new climatic conditions. It provides shade; it creates warming space. It caches humidity; it releases water. It blocks sunlight or reflects it when needed.

So life goes on. Differently. No apocalyptic event will stop us from doing what we want to do: exploring possibilities.

Jonathan Moser

The RAUMPARK I imagine establishes a NEW CLIMATIC TERRAIN (NCT) — an instrument which [e]merges [out of] the oppositional distinction between natural and constucted, thus enabling an ecotechnical network, based on interrelations between all species, to form a complex environment of coexistence.

The NCT doesn’t simply rest in the physical world, assuming some geographical position in the coordinate system of the city of Vienna. This projection of a new responsive ground constitutes both an approach/a method and the resulting space of a physical network of large and small-scale interventions.

In order to explore this framework, one needs to take into account that ecology is not only “natural”, but also first and foremost cultural. There is no binary separation between natural and artificial, an object and its surrounding, the “real” and the virtual etc. As Timothy Morton puts it, environment consists of organisms; there is no external environment.

Digital ecologies are becoming more and more relevant in facing transformations in climate conditions and the topic of HITZE. The possible scenarios of eco­logical transformations are situated in a realm of animated processes and a reoccurring perpetual novelty. NCT is not about direct solutions in combating global warming, but it is both a cognitive and a physical proposal for what kind of landscape that never existed before might become present in our desired future.

Stepan Nesterenko

→ fig. 2 / p. 5 → fig. 48-49 / p. 17 → fig. 37 / p. 14 → fig. 54-55 / p.19 1 This review was written while living in quarantine due to COVID-19, the coronavirus that spread over the whole planet in 2020, killing approximately 20,000 people worldwide by early April 2020. All the measures that had been unthinkable for stopping global warming were effectively implemented by almost all governments within a few days. Social life as we knew it was put on hold.

2 Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, Polity Press, Cambridge/ Oxford/Boston/New York, 2018

HTC GLC Alessandra Cianchetta Antje Lehn

REVIEW WINTER 2019

2

Pia Bauer Veronika Behawetz Annika Böcher Jákob Czinger Martin Eichler Sebastian Gäfgen Yingpi Gao Paula Hattenkerl Haruka Inari Oana-Alexandra Ionescu Dilâ Kirmizitoprak Ferdinand Klopfer Kateřina Kunzová Valeriia Malysh Mehmet Özkan Lisa Penz Zoe Pianaro Larissa Raith Paul Schurich Roxane Seckauer Ruben Stadler Mona Steinmetzer Vincent Wörndl Luca Emilia Wulf

can be experienced. The Romantic concept of natural research sees nature in a constant state of becoming, the ultimate truth lies in the poetic notion. Romantic scientists like Alexander von Humboldt adhered to encyclopaedic methods and contributed to extending and expanding them – while aware of the limited view of the scientific process. Humboldt studied geology at the Freiberg School of Mines and later published his famous Essay on the Geography of Plants 7 in which he introduced the so-called Naturgemälde, an attempt to create the first infographic representing a place and at the same time claiming superior knowledge and subjectivity of an author.

Reviewers and guests Sandra Bartoli Lisa Maria Enzenhofer Cristina Goberno Pesudo Marianne Schreck Daniel Zimmermann

The condition of HITZE stands for scar­ city and concentration of resources, environmental modifications due to climatic, technological and economic parameters, subsequent conflicts and displacements of populations, increasing imbalance in power, and political unrest. The question is how architecture, art, urban planning (and policymaking) can react to the threatening forecast of extreme heat in the contested urban realm. How can access to the most basic and essential goods like water, trees, landscapes, and liveable temperatures – in other words, a healthy environment – be publicly guaranteed? In a recent report on “The global tree restoration potential”3, scientists recommended the massive planting of trees to slow down the currently recorded trend of increasing temperatures connected to climate change4 – so, could planting an urban forest stop the heat in the city – or at least mitigate it?

Unlike policy-makers, architects and artists have the freedom to go further than providing mere technical solutions or regulations and can generate and test new possibilities, public forms, and inquiries.

We believe in the transformative power of art for bringing together a provisional community of urban species to cope with the challenges of HITZE and to build strategies of resilience, “... for art is the only form in which environmental problems can be solved” 5.

To propose an experimental (re-)forestation proposal five sites in Vienna were selected as artistic laboratories for the transformation of urban space. To learn from the transformative power of artworks on society we started with a focus on Joseph Beuys. His project 7000 Eichen – Stadtverwaldung statt Stadtverwaltung (presented at documenta 7), which involved planting 7000 trees of different species all over the city of Kassel and placing a basalt column beside each tree, triggered the discussion via the idea of Erweiterter Kunstbegriff, the principle of movement and the inclusion of society into art. According to the art historian Theodora Vischer Joseph Beuys related to romantic ideals when he described art as the negotiating power between a mechanistic and a dynamic world view, which by its principles creates and communicates knowledge6. Beuys’ work and his connection to the controversial romantic idea of a totality of nature was confronted with the current debate on the multiplicity and diversity of natures – seen through the eyes of other contemporary artists such as Agnes Denes, Olafur Eliasson, Lara Favaretto, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg or Lois Weinberger.

In discussing the ecological and climatic situation in Vienna today, the forces of glacial movements must be taken into account, as they have shaped its ground conditions, its topography, and its forestal ecosystems. Around the year 1800 European scientists investigated not only the concept of the Ice Age and its geological impacts, scientific research in the period of Early Romanticism was also influenced by the idea of the total science – including art as a means to understand nature. It was believed that encyclopaedic processes and combinatory principles would lead to an increased potentiality: the more single aspects can be connected and the more diverse these aspects are, the better the world

Before suggesting any ideas for transformation, it was necessary to gain an understanding of the condition of forests in the contemporary city of Vienna, starting with investigations of the ground, the water, the air and the question of the anthropocentric influence. Should trees be put in isolation, like the 300-year-old oaks in the area known as the Johannser Kogel in Lainzer Tiergarten, or should they be cared for and receive prosthetic devices, in accordance with the Schwammstadt principle? Do we want to guarantee trees (and other species) the right to grow in a so-called natural way, like in Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape, or ought they be drilled to perform certain duties as regards capturing CO2 and producing fresh air? Especially when trees amount to forests, the condition of HITZE relates to time and also money; for instance, Austrian forests have recently become popular as secure investments 8 – at a time when other investments, in real estate or otherwise, might be threatened by increasing heat. At the same time the last wastelands in Vienna are facing destruction, as the pressure exerted by the growing city threatens to transform them into residential districts.

MAPPING THE FOREST Based on the detailed surveys of the Franziszeischer Kataster and current climatic and economic data students produced large-scale, multi-layered mappings of five historical forest sites on the periphery of Vienna. These mappings documented not only the transformation during historic periods of growth but also the symbiosis of urban infrastructure, culture and different conditions of nature on the fringes of the city. Five typical Viennese forest landscapes and their conditions were depicted in extensive theme maps showing a combination of on-site research and data concerning nature, city and social features. Each theme map contained one layer related to physical environment and two other dimensions, elaborated further with detailed drawings, sections and other media. Following the idea of Alexander von Humboldt each group produced a Naturgemälde of their site as “a complex mode of visualizing scientific data” 9, where collected and traced phenomena were related to on-site experience of nature and a unique poetic notion. The communicative power and precision of Humboldt’s Naturgemälde provided the basis for a discussion on the role of representation “as a tool for thought”10.

CRITICAL PROJECTION This assignment asked for a proposal based on features taken from peripheral sylvan sites and conceptual thoughts from environmentally concerned artworks. These conditions were applied to five urban wastelands near the 19th century city borders of Vienna, resulting in manifold proposals critically ad­ dressing the human-nature relationship.

The projective designs included a circular border constructed with fragments of greenhouses that protect a flourishing secret garden from human intervention, a forensic documentation of historic soil layers and fallow trees, and a digital simulation of sensual experiences in an ancient forest. → fig. 14 / p. 9 → fig. 32 / p. 12 → fig. 40-41 / p. 15 → fig. 43 / p. 16 → fig. 46 / p. 17

Ich bin ja kein Gärtner, der Bäume pflanzt, weil Bäume schön sind. Nein, ich sage, die Bäume sind heute ja viel intelligenter als Menschen.

Joseph Beuys, 198411

Design Studio BArch1, BArch5, MArch

3 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/ 365/6448/76 4 www.technologyreview.com/s/613350/welcome-to-climate-change/ 5 Heiner Bastian (ed.), 7000 Eichen. Bern, 1985 6 Theodora Vischer, Beuys und die Romantik, Köln, 1983, pp. 44 7 Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: How Alexander Von Humboldt Revolutionized Our World, 2015 8 Waldmillionäre, in: GEWINN 38, Vienna, 2019, pp. 22 9 Silvie Romanowski, ”Humboldt’s Pictorial Science: An Analysis of the Tableau physique des Andes et pays voisins“, in: Essay on the Geography of Plants by Alexander von Humboldt and Aimée Bonpland, 2009 10 Diana Agrest, Architecture of Nature, Nature of Architecture, New York, 2018, p. 9 11 Eugen Blume, Catharine Nichols (eds.), Beuys.

Die Revolution sind wir, Göttingen, 2008

HTC GLC David Gissen Daniela Herold Chiara Desbordes Patricia Griffiths Sara Hozzankova Louise Jannot Martin Kohlberger Diana Konovalova Diana Mudrak Anna-Elina Pieber Severin Prügl Wendelin Schlachter Fabian Schwarz Quera Roman Sost Magdalena Stainer Martin Sturz Marie Teufel Jeanne Thierry Carla Veltman Reviewers and guests Victoria Bugge Øye Isabel Auer Sandra Bartoli Magdalena Holzer Gregorio Lubroth Lisa Schmidt-Colinet Angelika Schnell Dubravka Sekulic

Our studio explored the ‘architectural reconstruction of urban nature’ as a way of both resurrecting the former landscapes, ecologies and environments of Vienna’s past and reimagining the city’s future. We spent several weeks visiting and researching historical sites in Vienna – rediscovering aspects of the city’s environmental histories. Following this research phase, we created a giant, collective mural, approximately seven metres in length – Vienna Builds its Nature. This mural represents over 500 years of different landscapes, buildings and environments from Vienna’s urban and environmental history. Within the various ‘squares’ of this drawing, one can see visual reconstructions of ancient forests, early modern water systems, muddy streets, floods, slum neighbourhoods and industrial smoke, among other historical conditions. This mural serves as a monument to the city’s endless production of urban nature. Following the creation of this drawing, we developed individual projects that imagine a future interaction between architecture, urban nature and landscapes in the warming city. This latter work ranges from new codes and forms for inhabiting the urban underground to the introduction of a new water canal system and the decommissioning of the city’s automotive infrastructure.

Growing Maze is a project that identified the potentials of existing Viennese basements, their climatic conditions and their usage in times of suffocating heat. Secret and mostly unknown to the city’s inhabitants, these underground spaces, sometimes 2 to 3 storeys deep, offer a constant and temperate atmosphere. Rooms of different dimensions are connected by narrow corridors and labyrinthine staircases that lead to various levels. Their depth defines different temperature zones: the further down one gets, the cooler it is. What if we can’t bear the heat in environments established aboveground any longer?

What if we extend the existing underground structures and create a new city that no longer expands towards the sky, but rather into the ground? Growing Maze provides a system of underground navigation like a street network and a system of views heading towards the Earth’s surface, which allow for good orientation. Besides arranging smaller private spaces, bigger units are also introduced to enable the evolution of public life.

Looking back at the urban history of the Viennese territory, especially in the area of today’s 20th district, one can observe that large parts were covered by forest before it became a relevant urban development site in the late 19th century.

The project Back to the Woods proposes bringing this forest back into the city to provide cooling effects within the densely built-up area and to increase air quality. The new forest will be placed on the roofs of the housing blocks, gradually filling up the apartments with soil from top to bottom as the roots grow over time. In order to bear the increasing load of the soil and the trees, Back to the Woods proposes strengthening the buildings by thickening their walls and adding vaulted ceilings and buttresses. This new public space on top of the houses will be accessible from the courtyards of blocks by stairs and elevators. The trees populating this new forest will be of the same species as those of the former forest.

The project Urban Waste Towers is a commentary on current ‘sustainable’ development behaviours in the field of architecture and urban design. The project aims to discover and comment on how and what we are trying to sustain.

It criticizes the formulation of regulations and strategies that are supposed to direct our actions within sustainable developments that have not yet had any influence on our climate. It raises the question: Are we sustaining the climate to sustain ourselves?

Urban Waste Towers reacts to planning and high densification in urban blocks, which leads to high production of construction and demolition waste. It speculates about the amount of waste that will be created in a certain neighbourhood if we would continue to densify.

This waste is stored and represented by means of stacked towers. The towers are intended to become monuments to our current ’sustainable’ behaviour – urban anthropo-mountains that create sub-natures to facilitate publicness.

These latter proposals take on the character of individual architecture projects, but they, too, are compiled in another giant mural, The Architectural Reconstruction of Vienna’s Nature.

We believe that our collective work not only reveals aspects of Viennese projects and elements of a possible future, but also represents a way for architects and students to work collectively on their various visions of a future city.

David Gissen, Daniela Herold Design Studio BArch1, BArch5, MArch

→ fig. 4 / p. 6 → fig. 31 / p. 11 → fig. 36 / p. 13 → fig. 42 / p. 15

THESIS

Thesis Project Andreas Zißler Advisors Wolfgang Tschapeller Andreas Spiegl

Every two minutes, more photos are taken than the total amount of photos existing 150 years ago12. Moreover, synthetic image constructs operate without lenses and light; based on complicated algorithms, images are emerging that reproduce themselves without the necessity of optics, depicting nothing but themselves.

All the little technical devices and data bits and bytes buzzing around in the form of electrons are gathering together like a bundle of nerves, becoming what I have called here a sensory organ13, the retina of computational vision.

Probably not only in the realm of electrons, the model of monocular, central perspective is obsolete. What does this mean for architecture, its practice of production, its usage and representation? What does it mean for the concrete working conditions in the field of architecture?

By taking various points of view on the topic, my thesis enters into areas that are not primarily associated with vision, like the economic actors of the surveillance industry. Through design studies of a data centre, the project reflects not only on the sensory organ, but also provides an opportunity to observe the production of architectural work itself, which is mainly a production of images.

It seemed impossible to work on questions of computational vision operating from a single point of view, so I had to disperse my eye into a multitude of wandering perspectives, and entered into areas that are not primarily associated with vision. These fragments started to become their own kind of rudimentary sensory organ, or a kind of Braille.

In order to provide a minimum of orientation, I allocated these fragments to blind spots, some kind of clusters: - Using the motif of a sensory organ to make contemporary algorithmic vision more graspable, it was obvious to attempt to draw an anatomy of that eye. Since it is unmanageable to give an integrated view, this glimpse focuses on the physical structures behind hazy digital clouds, transposing abstract networks to tangible copper wires, metal racks and grains of silicon. The intention was also to show that there is still a lot of manual labour involved behind all the abstract, digitized and automated activities. By interconnecting and arranging these components, drawing the interlaced parts begins to render an incomprehensible space.

- The military and surveillance industries are among the driving forces in the development of new image technologies, which caused me to visit the IFSEC, an annual trade fair and conference for the global security industry in London. Audio and video materials offer impressions of the economy of surveillance lobbying and provided me with raw material for a greedy text algorithm that became an influential consultant throughout the process of this work.

- Scanning the surface of hidden surveil­ lance and mass data IT systems, this glimpse (un-)focuses on unrepresentative visual appearances of architecture. The EU’s backup Schengen and VISA IT system is hidden in idyllic Austrian mountain scenery.

- In all this, one must not forget how this work was created – staring most of the time at a computer screen, 1920 by 1080 pixels. This glimpse grasps what I will call here the computer sphere.

REVIEW WINTER 2019

3

- With the entire process of disintegration and fragmentation of the gaze, it was tempting to locate focal points, points of condensation, and junctions in the realm of algorithmic vision, to locate centres.

This has driven me to observe data centres. A property speculation of the currently largest Internet company became the Petri dish for more “concrete” speculation by asking simplified, isolated questions.

To observe my own practice of image production, I worked on a simplified, isolated design task concerning the design of a data centre building on that site, attempting to hand over control of the design work as much as possible and leave it up to algorithmic processes to do the job.

a constructor of our reality? This project aims to find means to experience this paradigmatic shift, from perspectival to spatial visuality. → fig. 10-12 / p. 8 → fig. 47 / p. 17

THESIS

→ fig.6-8 / p. 7 12 Eveleth, R., 2015. How Many Photographs of You Are Out There In the World? The Atlantic, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/ how-many-photographs-of-you-are-out-there-in-theworld/413389/ (accessed 2020-09-02).

13 See p. 22.

VIRTUAL SILVICULTURE IN A REAL FOREST Thesis project Valentin Heuwieser Advisors Wolfgang Tschapeller Luciano Parodi

Bush fires in Australia, forest clearances in Brazil, dying trees in Austria – the forest is in the news almost daily. Public awareness of the importance of the forest has grown significantly in recent years.

The future of the forest has been an integral part of this discourse – yet what is the future of our forests?

THESIS

Thesis project Fabian Puttinger Advisors Wolfgang Tschapeller Christina Jauernik

I wake up in the morning, from turbulent dreams. I find myself in my bed, transformed. Lying on my back, I see, when I open my eyes, the ceiling, but the ceiling seems so far away, blurry, in a haze.

What’s happened to me? It’s not a dream.

The room is a real one, only much deeper than usual. It’s there, calm with its four walls. Although the walls are blurry, I feel their presence, the corners, roughly, but something has changed.

When I raise my body in order to look in the mirror, I realize that it has to do with my eyes. I recognize my eyes, but all the traits of my face have changed. I feel my body, my head, heavier than usual.

Amongst all the cables and screws, I only recognize my eyes, also changed, closer to each other. When I touch my head, I find a screw; curious about its purpose, I turn it, and through its turning I realize that my eyes move even closer to each other. Only then do I notice that my surroundings seem much closer than the day before. I am in the same space, but feel it more closely now.

As I turn to the right, I see as always the plant that has stood by my bed for a long time. It has changed, too. It seems as if I am not looking at the plant, but as if I am inside the plant. I don’t feel where the plant ends and where my body starts; we are together now in this space, closer to each other.

200122 - performative screening text

This thesis project deals with the simple fact that we are beings with two eyes. It is about the role of our visuality in contemporary environments, and about how we could productively raise questions that tackle the construction of our visual perception in relation to architecture.

In the production of scientific knowledge as well as in our everyday culture, visuality has taken a prominent role. In contemporary media environments, human interaction with the world increasingly takes place via various types of images and screens that display visual information in a one-eyed way. However, this construction of the world is based on a one-eyed geometrical perspective, and is seemingly immaterial, disconnected from bodies and environments.

This is exactly where my project tries to raise questions that influence the potential production of architecture, because when we acknowledge the seemingly simple fact that we have two eyes, a lot changes, and the one-eyed perspectival reality we hold onto so dearly starts to disappear, eventually leading to the question of what to do without perspective as

Starting from a case study based in a forest at the edge of Vienna, this project speculates on the kind of forest that could emerge in the age of the (post-) Anthropocene.

Into The Woods is based on a meticulous analysis of a field in Moosgraben, a protected ‘core zone’ of the biosphere reserve Wienerwald, spanning 50 by 50 metres.

The tools employed in this project are a combination of a language and methods rooted in architecture, and newly introduced technologies such as laser scanning and photogrammetry. Together they make the space describable and understandable.

The project does not stop at mere description. Through abstraction, it creates and opens up new spaces. It offers speculations on the future, showing a forest designed by humans, bioengineered, perfected for human use. It thus takes silviculture, the cultivation and management of forests, to a new level.

The project also renders visible the futility of such endeavours, drawing attention to coincidence and chaos, which are ultimately as much part of nature as order and control. → fig. 44-45 / p. 16

THESIS

A VISUAL NOVEL Thesis project Rebecca Merlic Advisors Wolfgang Tschapeller Dominik Strzelec

IN THE VISUAL NOVEL, I ERASE THE PRIVATE HOME AND FOCUS ON MY INDIVIDUAL LIFE WITHOUT RENTING A PRIVATE APARTMENT. A visual novel of the experiment of me, a white, European 30-year-old heterosexual human, not inhabiting a private apartment in Tokyo over a period of time. My smartphone is my only property, my organizer.

No need for private spaces in the future.

We have to think of a city as a complicated construction of various networks. The instant or 即席-places are pearls on a chain, chains that multiply and auto-generate themselves. No complete overview can be given. The device, which we carry with us every day, provides glimpses based on pure hedonistic preferences and previous encounters with the 即席rooms we have chosen to visit. A conservative private space consists of rooms to sleep, wash, eat, delight and store. I used to live in an apartment in the past.

The conservative apartment had 4 rooms:

a bedroom, a living room, a bathroom and a kitchen. I sleep in public spaces: on the train, in the love hotel, in the capsule, in the Anime Cafe, book and bed, 9h, or at the workplace. The bedroom is abolished.

No more cooking. The infrastructure of the so-called konbini and affordable food in restaurants, fast-food restaurants and street food stalls is abundant and an integral part of Japanese everyday life and culture. The kitchen is abolished.

Bathing is carried out in public spaces, in so-called sentos. Bathhouses are not only meant for cleaning, but also for your wellbeing, beauty and health. The bathroom is abolished. The city as a house is a new strategy of dissolving one room after another. It is a liberation. We don’t have to own or pretend to have property anymore. In 1903 Hermann Muthesius said, “Japan is in many respects the country that comes closest to one’s dream of paradise.” Dissolving the private liberates and creates new forms of society. In the history of pre-modern Japanese housing, the concept of puraibashii (privacy) was alien, and it was unknown to the general population during the Meiji Restoration.

Pre-industrial Japanese households were ‘fluid’ spaces with virtually no privacy.

The current situation in Tokyo allows for the emergence of a turbo-dense, capitalism-driven space generator for satisfying one’s personal longings and needs. The question is whether the in-between spaces, the decentralization, as well as networked and digitalized urbanism make it possible to live without private spaces. Is a new form of nomad living not only being constructed in digital and virtual space, but also in concrete space? Will this lead to the alteration of the city’s skyline and the creation of ruins of property?

What will happen to these spaces, should they become obsolete? Shifting privacy to nondomestic spaces can lead to various architectural consequences. The space left by this shift can provide new space for more and different infrastructure, which can add value for society.

The resulting developments are driven by technology, money and societal needs.

The city as a house depicts an illusion of private ownership of a place we call home and transfers it into the cityscape, where the human occupies a certain amount of space while moving or resting, depending on time and need. What does it mean to be freed from the urge of craving a nest?

The city as a house is a strategy of successfully surviving without being dependent on the housing market. Let us use this system and reinterpret what it means to live without a home. It is a proposition of a new form of society, a new form of living – the next self-improvement of humanity, or going back to our roots. TheCityAsAHouse is a visual novel that is built with the game engine Unity to open up digital space for the human user to relive the experiences one has created.

We have to create experiences and situations, moments by which the monotony of capitalist everyday routine may be disrupted, by using already built spaces instead of building new ones. Architects build enough. Following this, individuals have to use devices to wander throughout a city, to allow themselves to meet new humans and places, to recognize the spectacle and subvert it. Capitalism must be redefined in the case of pure survival, resulting in pleasure for every human.

The 即席-places are places where a reinterpretation of the functions and the search for private living spaces is attempted. This manifests itself in digital space by not reproducing reality in order to make it understandable, but by reducing it to essential elements, namely to the subjective experiences of an individual. These experiences can only be experienced once, as in real life. The scenes are reduced to their essentials and have a further level through interaction with objects. The protagonist tells the user anecdotes from this concept of life. The project is based on an alternative concept of life, which arises and grows through different parameters depending on the situation and time.

60 min i7 - 3775k, 24gb ram, 2gb Nvidia Grafikkarte, ssd 256gb or better / Unity Tatami mat/ Screen/ GameController/PC Sound design: Manuel Riegler Post Processing: Vivien Schreiber

→ fig. 50-51 / p. 18

THESIS

EXCURSION

We acknowledge the traditional owners of the countries where we met and through which we travelled, and we recognise their continuing connection to land and culture. We pay our respect to their Elders past, present and emerging.

AUSTRALIA OFF-SEASON. AVERAGE TEMPERATURE 35ºC. HUMIDITY 30% - 80% ESC Road trip 7 – 27 February 2020 Organisation Luciano Parodi Hannes Stiefel

Thesis project Helvijs Savickis Advisors Hannes Stiefel Damjan Minovski

The project Two Structures in Outer Space explores several conditions and environments on celestial bodies, describing speculative visions in outer space that shape awareness of the edges of our living surroundings. These visions investigate the boundaries between natural and artificial, between desires and possibilities. The structures respond to the miraculous potentials and infinite promises of outer space. Yet the work also speaks presciently to the state of our planet – ecology, politics, our hopes and fears for life on Earth (and beyond).

The project’s intention is to reflect on our newest discoveries and to go beyond them, looking at the huge potential of an infinite hypothesis and an environment of hyperphysical permanencies.

ANTENNA On Psyche 16 a structure is proposed: an antenna that emits signals in all possible ranges. Fascination and weird noises surround it. It emerged as a strong argument for a wish to communicate, but mainly to find more ... We can never hear its silence; we cannot see its signals, either. The antenna is not purely infra­ structure, but also functions as an archi­ tectural element and as a shelter to explore the universe. It provides us with images from places that do not yet have any names, from regions of the outside of the outside. It is a tool of communication, diagnosis and repair, because signals can still reach places that objects cannot.

The antenna consists of the materials of its environment, iron and nickel. It is located inside a crater and uses the shape of its natural environment to direct the radio waves. In its lowest parts, it emits heavy gamma rays, and higher up, it transmits longer electromagnetic signals. It transmits and receives electromagnetic waves.

The antenna converts the energy into radio waves that radiate from the antenna into space at the speed of light. The radio waves travel through space until they are either reflected by an object or absorbed.

FOUNTAIN Inside the fountain and sometimes covered by ice, a structure functioning as a casino is suggested. The precise origin of gambling is unknown, but it is generally believed that gambling in some form or another has been seen in almost every society in our history. Yet this casino is not used for gambling with money.

Instead, it functions as a timeless space.

Here, gambling represents the ideology of progress and its tragedy at the same time. What it shows us is a loss of control: collapse and recovery, processes of randomness. It might be a space to discuss the heritage of mankind and natural resources. → fig. 3 / p. 5 → fig. 9 / p. 8

Veronica Behawetz Daniel Bracher Alexander Czernin Katharina Eder Christina Ehrmann Christopher Gruber Sara Hozzankova Alma Kelderer Dila Kirmizitoprak Diana Konovalova Kateřina Kunzová Elisa Mazagg Ondrej Mraz Stepan Nesterenko Anna Orbanic Maximilian Pertl Magdalena Stainer Martin Sturz Marie Teufel Catherine Zesch

IMAGES OF HEAT We drove mostly alone. An average of 400 km a day. We arrived at empty camps with overall adverse conditions: glowing, burning sun, only hot water in the pipes (if available at all), and curious insects. The landscape fluidised while driving in the heat. It was not about fata-morganas on the horizon but about the heat reflected from the asphalt and the environment in your eyes. The air was suffocatingly hot, blowing through the open window like from an air dryer.

The landscape changed rapidly, constantly rearranging the same set of features: bushes, grass, salt planes, red soil, hills, termite mounds, eucalyptus trees, dead animal, living animals, etc.

The sky remained though, constantly cloudless, implacable.

AN UNFOLDED TIME Some Aboriginal cultures (people?) from South Australia perceive space as deep and simultaneous. Time, too, is deep and not quantifiable. No years, no hours, no sequences. Our journey, on the contrary, was linear, just like our notion of time and our narrative. Our line crossed a landscape of interwoven lines. Aboriginals construct these lines (songlines) while ‘singing’ themselves across their countries. Their world begins to exist while advancing. Our awareness grew while driving through an unknown landscape. Only random circumstances, like broken vehicles, or human mishandling disrupted this linearity, expanding and accelerating it into parallel and simultaneous time-space experiences.

LIVING WITH OTHERS Flies. For two-thirds of the trip we were living in the closest imaginable relationship with flies. We started the day by putting nets over our heads. The flies were less interested in food than in our bodies’ moist areas. Eyes, mouth and nostrils are constant sources of humidity. When the temperature rose and we began to perspire, flies would gather all over those parts of our bodies that were in shade. Each evening, as soon as they disappeared, one completely forgot the insects until the next day when the head-net ritual would start all over again. The body needs lapses into oblivion, in order to regenerate from the constant awareness of possible others.

REVIEW WINTER 2019

4

Workshop HEA[R]T[H]14, Oratunga, by: MARGIT BRÜNNER Assistance: URS BETTE

ranging from the dream of a Golden Age as described by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, to Thomas More’s classic Utopia.

Images of nature, moods, idylls which initially seem pleasant but actually harbour something critical.

14 HEA[R]T[H provides an insight into cross-cultural, interdisciplinary approaches to place. The two-day immersion into the lands of Oratunga in the Flinders Ranges offers a platform to engage in non-mechanistic interpretations of `landscape’ and to productively interrogate the possible implications for the discipline of architecture. (Margit Brünner) We gratefully acknowledge: MARGIT BRÜNNER and URS BETTE for workshop, advice and support on many levels; GINI LEE for having us in Oratunga; ENICE MARSH, Adnyamathanha Elder, and traditional owner of the Flinders Ranges, for sharing with us stories of the Adnyamathanha people and their country; RYAN MCMILLAN for showing us the southern night skies; STEPHEN MUECKE for receiving us in his home and introducing us to basics of aboriginal cultures; EVA BLIMLINGER for her generous support.

→ fig. 20–22 / p. 10-11 → fig. 52 / p. 18

GENDER QUEER DECOLONIAL STUDIES A course by Roswitha Schuller

EARTH, PARADISE CITY, ARCADIA, ECOTOPIA, EMPIRE, HABITAT & CITYLAND John Brinckerhoff Jackson, the American author and publisher of the magazine Landscape. Human Geography of the Southwest is regarded as one of the founders of Cultural Landscape Studies, a transdisciplinary theoretical approach to research into the present-day landscape in its socio-political and aesthetic form. Jackson makes an elementary shift from an aestheticizing understanding of landscape, which from the eighteenth or, at the latest, nineteenth century was de­ cisively shaped by British authors (such as Gilpin, Cobbet, Ruskin, for example), to research into the contemporary everyday landscape, the vernacular landscape.

According to Jackson, as landscape occupies space on the surface of the earth various occupations of space of this kind can also be read as landscape Landscape is a space on the surface of the earth; intuitively we know that it is a space with a degree of permanence, with its own distinct character, either topographical or cultural, and above all a space shared by a group of people; and when we go beyond the dictionary definition of landscape and examine the word itself we find out that our intuition is correct.

Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, John Brinckerhoff Jackson 1984

EARTH In the context of landscape and nature motifs the familiar, everyday image of the blue planet earth is a recent pictorial invention. The first extra-terrestrial perspective of the earth’s landscape came from the twentieth century Apollo missions (from 1961 onwards); the Apollo 8 mission photographed earthrise, the rising of planet earth. Through the depiction produced by the later Apollo mission in 1972, the blue marble became an icon and pioneered a new view of the world.

As its fragility was recognised, the seemingly sublime blue marble became the meaningful symbol of the environmental movement.

PARADISE CITY Take me down to the paradise city where the grass is green and the girls are pretty oh won’t you please take me home Paradise City, Guns ’n’ Roses 1986

Landscape is a system of images and is also a value system; as such it is formed and transported through stories and narratives. The loss of nature significantly shapes Judaeo-Christian iconography in the narrative of the lost Garden of Eden.

There also exist several profane narratives

ARCADIA The motif Arcadia is best described not as a space of crisis but a place of vanitas, of deliberately suggested transience – a motif provided by a synthesis of portraits of landscape and society. The place Arcadia should be imagined against the background of the urban environment.

The image of landscape develops out of the Arcadian behaviour of city dwellers and not from the actual circumstances of real landscapes. In much the same way that Walter Benjamin described the city for flâneurs – it opens to them as a landscape, surrounds them like a living room – we should see Arcadia as an analogy, a space of potential whose quality as an experience shapes its form, as a topography that is imaginary rather than physical.

The contradictions of this place, which can still be found on a map of present-day Greece but whose qualities are not tied to a physical place, are what constitute its particular attraction, starting with the poetry of classical antiquity, which imagines it as a refuge beyond the everyday world. In fact, Virgil’s descriptions of rural life no longer matched the reality of his time. Even then agriculture was already so differentiated that large rural farms more than 500 hectares in area, known as latifundia, were monocultures farmed by slaves. Already in antiquity the discrepancy of unproductivity and idleness was a fact, landscape was no longer just beautiful nature but also a space that could be utilized for agriculture – not a place for idle shepherds.

ECOTOPIA Like everything in Ecotopia, my room is full of contradictions.

ECOTOPIA, Ernest Callenbach 1975

The way in which a culture deals with nature can be read as its mirror image.

Nature becomes a large pool of suppressed primal fears and a compensation for a way of life that has been lost – or which, as a consequence of the achievements of development, we have forgotten how to lead. Equally, the question about nature or the landscape is a question about space, its expansion and the elimination of its boundaries, which changes and which each generation must address and define anew. Additionally, there are ecological and economic problems that are the subject of reflections on the use of resources, on the utilisation of organic material and on the impact of ecological changes on our life environment and on the global climate. With the industrialisation of the nineteenth century the countries affected began to make use of fossil energy sources. We are currently experiencing the shortage of and the problems caused by fossil energy with, at the same time, an excess of information that mediates, i.e. that must be transported by using energy. The wishes or fears that arise through people’s elementary confrontation with their environment are processed as narrations in various literary and artistic modes. The formation of complex social structures and the parallel development of cultural techniques triggers both the perceived and the real loss of nature.

EMPIRE Landscape is one of the large-scale systems of images and rules of human culture, extended in an extra-terrestrial perspective and expanded to the cosmos.

It is always a form of land seizure. Marxist cultural theorist Raymond Williams understands landscape in the context of drawing boundaries – country and nation – and thus sets the colonial marker for the image of landscape. The Briton understands the colonial power England, the empire, as providing image and ideas, not only for the entire Anglo-American world but also for the visual worlds that were and are produced in the former crown lands. Williams describes the field of tension between town and country (and the related nature), the rural and the urban, as the model for the larger, scaled international field of tension of industri­

alisation and colonialization. Great Britain, as the dominant colonial power, transported its imagination of landscape, supported by antique mythology and Mediterranean images of longing, to the entire world.

From at least the mid-nineteenth century, and with important instances earlier, there was this larger context within which every idea and every image was consciously and unconsciously affected.

The Country and the City, Raymond Williams 1973

HABITAT Alle wollen zurück zur Natur, aber keiner zu Fuß.

(Everyone wants to get back to nature, but nobody wants to go there by foot.)

Der Standard, Kategorie Lifestyle, Mobilität – Audi Q3 im Test, Andreas Stockinger 2 March 2020

Whereas until the mid-nineteenth cen­ tury the enjoyment of landscape images, whether by viewing art works, reading literature or through the performative inspection of the parks of palaces and villas, was largely reserved for the ruling classes, in the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century the democratisation of this experience began.

The concepts of urban parks, allotment gardens and garden cities open the experience of landscape to a large sector of the population. Closely linked to the expanding industrial society, spaces for the presentation of goods such as shopping arcades and glass palaces for world exhibitions were also developed, which, like gardens in earlier times, were islands and places of yearning in the rapidly growing big cities. These urban landscapes cultivated in Europe were the model for a new form of architecture, which was to develop after the major transformation of the American image of the city following the Second World War. Through the rapid growth of the automobile industry and the motorisation that resulted from it the middle classes become more mobile and autonomous. Two new leisure time architectures experienced rapid growth: the drive-in cinema and the shopping mall, which developed for much the same reasons as their nineteenth century European models. The increasing deterioration of the urban environment, which became evident in the areas of ecology and safety, compelled retailing to find a solution that would ensure customers a pleasant and safe shopping environment.

Victor Gruen, urban planner and architect, describes the new planning concept retrospectively in his manifesto Centers for the urban environment: Survival of the cities in terms of overcoming the idea of the mall as purely a sales machine and making it instead into an urban crystalli­ sation point that can offer residents of the suburbs significant opportunities for experiences, and in this way introduced the concept of themed architecture.

Gruen saw the creation of artificial shopping worlds as offering a real ecological chance to preserve the environment.

In slogans such as “Back to Nature” or “Back to Country Life” he also recognised the other aspect of a flight that would lead to the erasure of the last untouched remnants of natural landscape. Gruen saw the role of retailing as a factor that has always made significant contributions to the design of the environment.

for consumption and the use of leisure time expand outside and on the outskirts of the cities. The landscape images reflected by these built surrogates are the familiar motifs of the paradisaical, the Arcadian and the exotic. In the years after 2000 the form of architectural ersatz itself becomes a thematic leitmotif, a reappropriation that seems like a feedback loop: large new mega-mall structures are created that frame Gruen’s small town feeling in streetscapes or retroscapes, as described by American sociologist George Ritzer in his case study on the Easton Town Center.

Transformation in Consumer Settings: Landscapes and Beyond, 2005

Shopping and spending time in nature?

Tick them both off in one go at Cityland Mall – which is being developed near Global Village by the same people behind Dubai Miracle Garden and Dubai Butterfly Garden. Described as the world’s first “nature-inspired” shopping mall, it’s packed with botanical wonders and will even feature an open-air garden in the centre. With a 12-screen cinema, more than 75 restaurants and space for 350 shops, the mall expands over 2.2 million square feet. The Carrefour hypermarket has just opened its doors, and the rest of the mall is expected to be in full bloom this year. https://whatson.ae/2019/05/7– epic– new– mega– malls– in– dubai– due– to– shake– up– your– shopping– experience/, May 2019

Cityland, the new attraction among Dubai’s mega-malls, also illustrates the retrograde tendency of this building form. Cityland therefore forms part of a syllabus of landscape images which, although using a nostalgic aesthetic impact, are unable to conceal fears of loss and fracture lines in landscapes, these spaces on the surface of the earth.

Roswitha Schuller

PUBLICATION

HUMANKIND’S MOST VALUABLE TOOL? A new book edited by Michelle Howard and Luciano Parodi, published by De Gruyter, Berlin 2020

Our use of tools began with our hominin ancestors over 2 million years ago and has often been portrayed as our defining attribute. Tools have enabled us to record ideas, make objects, tell stories and construct spaces whose uselessness still confounds us today. The logic of use equals value emerged much later when it was wed to employability and efficiency.

Current predictions suggest that the rise of artificial intelligence will produce an unemployable “useless” class to which most of us will belong. Uselessness contradicts and confounds the logic of use equals value; it resists definition and categorisation. If indeed our future is to be defined by our uselessness, then shouldn’t our evaluation of it be reappraised?

CITYLAND As a mediator between industry and the customers’ individual needs retailing must create an atmosphere that presents goods attractively – provided there is an excess of goods. If retailing can no longer take place in a public realm that has grown hostile it must, with the help of architects and town planners, create an alternative environment. Gruen’s vision was to use the suburban mall to create a village-like atmosphere, which probably explains why the complexes aim for a European, or more specifically Mediter­ ranean, character and why it was primarily Italianate design means, various building elements, ornaments and sculptures that were imported. The village structure aimed for was massively expanded from the 1950s onwards, the new planning form of the suburban retail districts was created at the point of transition from urban to rural space.

Michelle Howard USELESSNESSS IS A RAREFIED THING

In the second half of the twentieth century we see how these experience centres

Friedemann Schrenk IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS USELESSNES

Ebru Kurbak INFREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS: Excavating Obsolete Migrant Skills Miguel Paredes Maldonado REFUSING TO PERFORM: Transutility, or the contemporary value of uselessness in architecture Ruth Sonderegger USELESSNESS AND PURPOSELESSNESS: On the Central Norms and Imperatives of Western Aesthetics Owen Hatherley USELESS, AND THEN DANGEROUS: Public Space and Property in 20th century British Modernist Housing Ryan Stec USELESS ARCHITECTURE Kerstin Meyer USE–LESS–LAND: Two centuries of defending the Tempelhofer Field in Berlin

Sonia Leimer CONQUEST OF THE USELESS Diedrich Diederichsen ART—USE—USEFULNESS: Two Discourses: Use Value and Instrumentalization Luciano Parodi USELESSNESS, XXXXXi

Proof Reading: Roderick O´Donovan Translation from German into English: James Gussen Layout: Carla Veltman Printed with financial support from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

→ fig. 33-35 / p. 12

Winter Semester 2019 is part of the annual project HITZE TAKES COMMAND, generously supported by IMMOBILIEN PRIVATSTIFTUNG.

REVIEW WINTER 2019

5

fig. 1 Composter. We made a new home for microorganisms by constructing a composter from found materials. This we maintained and nurtured in the studio, using food waste, paper and organic model-making materials. Along with pungent smells and airborne wildlife, it generated a near constant heat of 60 degrees Celsius.

Burning Down the House → p. 1 Photo: Catherine Zesch

fig. 2 KOIT/WOAM, Raumpark study.

Jakob Jakubowski RAUMPARK – Faux Terrain Vienna → p. 1

fig. 3 Site comet with structure. Helvijs Savickis Two Structures in Outer Space or How to distribute /in/visible Resources → p. 3

REVIEW WINTER 2019

6

fig. 4 Growing Maze. Chiara Desbordes Rebuilding Viennese Environments with Architecture → p. 2

fig. 5 Wildfire Case Studies. The Institute of Silviculture at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) Vienna has compiled a comprehensive database on Austrian forest fires. It contains the written and transcribed records of the municipalities and fire brigades, as well as metadata on probable cause, location, area size, affected species, etc., which are continuously recorded in the database.

We enriched this information by visiting the scene of each disaster, observing the fire’s traces, conducting interviews, and extracting soil and vegetation samples. Finally we analysed it all using the tools of the architect.

Burning Down the House I → p. 1

REVIEW WINTER 2019

7

fig. 6-8 Transcription of seven hours of audio material collected at the IFSEC in London, an international fair for the security and surveillance industry. This was the dataset to train a text-based algorithm to continue the talk of the salesman, which became the consultant as I let this program take decisions on the project.

Video still: A study of gazes at the security fair Milled 1:1 model of the mirror image / self-portrait of the laser scanner Andreas ZiĂ&#x;ler, The Dissolution of my Eye → p. 2

8

REVIEW WINTER 2019

fig. 9 Frame 00078. Helvijs Savickis Two Structures in Outer Space or How to distribute /in/visible Resources → p. 3

fig. 10-12 What if knowledge about human vision were used to enrich our understanding of others? How we think of them and how we see them, or better, how we see with them. ‘Seeing together’ could become an act of translation or dialogue between what we consider as ‘us’ and ‘them’. It would be less a process of reflection, but rather an engagement of mutual interest and care, eventually blurring boundaries between human/non-human entities.

These limitless questions stand at the centre of this project. They are questions on the inseparability of human and natural worlds. This project tries to raise these questions productively by shifting our very own way of how to visually perceive our environments, feeling closer to the world by seeing differently together with others. Or in other words, as Bruno Latour recently put it, “This is not a discovery in extension, but a discovery in intensity. A new form of being in the old land but understood differently.”

(Source: INSIDE, A lecture-performance

by Bruno Latour, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=gzPROcd1MuE) How can we see without perspective as the constructor of our ‘reality’?

How can we redefine our visual relationship to our environments?

How can we question the boundaries between humans and non-humans?

How can we feel closer to these ‘others’?

“For example, if a computer interface is hooked up to a given instrument, is the computer part of the apparatus? Is the printer attached to the computer part of the apparatus? Is the paper that is fed into the printer? Is the person who feeds in the paper? How about the person who reads the marks on the paper?

How about the community of scientists who judge the significance of the experiment and indicate their support or lack of support for future funding? What precisely constitutes the limits of the apparatus that gives meaning to certain concepts at the exclusion of others?”

- Barad, Karen. Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality. (1998) Fabian Puttinger Reality doesn't need me → p. 3

REVIEW WINTER 2019

9

fig. 13 The Beauty Keeps Striking Me. On the morning of the 3rd of April 2020, a truck arrives at the scene of Wildfire 20160403_02. In it is a thermal device that will change the topology of the forest. Over the next 8139 days, one spruce tree will be felled daily. The commodity’s monetary value is replaced by the ephemeral creation of radiant space. This piece explores thermal situations and dependencies, and our ambiguous relationship with material prosperity, selfcontentment, light-heartedness and uselessness.

Nils Neuböck, Burning Down the House I → p. 1

fig. 14 Naturgemälde for Neuwaldegg. Naturgemälde is a format introduced by Alexander von Humboldt, inventing a new type of diagram that combines scientific findings with atmospheric and subjective features in a peculiarly poetic composition resembling a landscape drawing. Jákob Czinger, Oana-Alexandra Ionescu, Zoe Pianaro, Luca Wulf, Stadtverwaldung. Learning from Beuys? → p. 1

REVIEW WINTER 2019

10

fig. 15-19 Ohne Titel. Salome Schramm, RAUMPARK – Faux Terrain Vienna → p. 1

REVIEW WINTER 2019

11

fig. 23-30 Construction of a Wood Charcoal Kiln. Together with the Hochecker family, we constructed a traditional wood charcoal kiln in a traceable and low-impact production cycle. Over 6 weeks we: (i) selectively felled trees, (ii) cut, split and stacked the wood in layers, (iii) covered it with evergreen branches, (iv) then with charcoal dust and earth, (v) carried flames up to activate the process of pyrolysis, (vi) cared for the kiln, (vii) extracted the wood charcoal. This process has been classified as Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO. Burning Down the House I → p. 1

fig. 20-22 Pink Lakes, Oratunga. Itinerary. Into the Heat → p. 3 Photos and map: Luciano Parodi

03 splitting pieces of wood

fig. 31 Back to the Woods. Re-evolving the forest back into the urban environment. Wendelin Schlachter.

Rebuilding Viennese Environments with Architecture → p. 2

REVIEW WINTER 2019

12

fig. 33-35 Views inside the book by Michelle Howard, Luciano Parodi, USELESSNESS. Is it humankind’s most valuable tool?, 2020 → p. 4

REVIEW WINTER 2019

13

fig. 32 Mapping the Forest. To understand urban forests as a laboratory for radical transformation, the conditions of five different forest types in Vienna were investigated, taking into account parameters as varied as historical landscape development and ownership, ground conditions, air quality, habitats of insects and the local wind situation.

A collection of maps of the same scale was developed, experimenting with forms of representation to show relations between nature and culture, human activities and natural cycles. The image shows a collage of the following maps: Stammersdorf: Artificial Light; Lobau: History of Water and Soil; Laaer Berg: Existing and Potential Third Landscape Areas; Lainzer Tiergarten: Boundaries of Trees and Tree Types, Neuwaldegg: Habitat of Butterflies. Pia Bauer, Veronika Behawetz, Annika Böcher, Jákob Czinger, Martin Eichler, Yingpi Gao, Paula Hattenkerl, Haruka Inari, OanaAlexandra Ionescu, Dilâ Kirmizitoprak, Ferdinand Klopfer, Kateřina Kunzová, Valeriia Malysh, Mehmet Özkan, Lisa Penz, Zoe Pianaro, Larissa Raith, Paul Schurich, Roxane Seckauer, Ruben Stadler, Mona Steinmetzer, Vincent Wörndl, Luca Emilia Wulf Stadtverwaldung. Learning from Beuys? → p. 1

fig. 36 Vienna Builds its Nature. 500 years of different landscapes, buildings and environments from Vienna’s urban and environmental history, collective mural.

Rebuilding Viennese Environments with Architecture → p. 2

14

REVIEW WINTER 2019

fig. 37 Donau-Park. Christina Ehrmann, Christopher Gruber, RAUMPARK – Faux Terrain Vienna → p. 1

fig. 38-39 Anatomy of a Wildfire. Johannes Wiener, Burning Down the House I → p. 1

REVIEW WINTER 2019

15

fig. 40-41 A map crated on the basis of a digital scan to trace the positions of the trees. Mapping the secret value of an abandoned area by documentation of trees and transfer of soil layers uncovers a future landscape of a past species.

Exhumation, a tree cadastre. Thousands of trees are mapped in the Viennese Baumkataster (tree cadastre). Why are the trees on the site missing? Why not treat them equally?

Kateřina Kunzová, Stadtverwaldung. Learning from Beuys? → p. 1

fig. 42 Urban Waste Towers. Sara Hozzankova.

Rebuilding Viennese Environments with Architecture → p. 2

REVIEW WINTER 2019

16

fig. 43 Moosgraben – Immersive journey through the forest. Still 3D visualization – site impression. This animation was part of “Invisible Nature”, an experiential mixed-reality art installation working in the liminal space between art, technology and the natural world. It creates a specific visual language that expands perception and challenges our lived experiences.

Based on a point cloud 3D model recorded by Valentin Heuwieser, the data was manipulated to represent different components of living nature, working with the colour spectrum, the size of the points, the interaction between the points and vision, etc. These individual elements were applied as a visual vocabulary to the point cloud data in order to uniquely illustrate spatial and scale relations, and to recreate the experience of a moving and breathing forest. Jákob Czinger and Oana-Alexandra Ionescu, Stadtverwaldung. Learning from Beuys? → p. 1 Link: https://vimeo.com/399847566

fig. 44-45 Arboreal Archive – Core Detail Rhizome.

In my survey of the site, I looked at different scales – from the canopy and the section through the forest to small details like fungi or stones. I extracted certain details from this entirety, zooming in closer in order to develop an Arboreal Archive. I refer to them as core details, ‘Leitdetails’ in German, again applying the language of architecture. I intentionally work without scales in order to create and open up new spaces.

The virtual camera makes different perspectives and perceptions of the forest possible.

The Forest of the (Post-)Anthropocene – Phase V: Elevation. Considering that the forest is already heavily influenced by human intervention, what will happen to the forest if this intensifies? The ‘forest of the (post-)Anthropocene’ illustrates what could happen if we as humans decide to continue on our current path.

I used the method of simulation and the merging of natural processes in order to speculate on developments within this new forest. Phase V shows the state where the initial human-cultivated order has been completely overthrown by the mutated organisms proliferating freely, overgrowing the old grid and forming a new kind of forest not seen before.

Valentin Heuwieser Into the Woods. Virtual Silviculture in a Real Forest → p. 3

REVIEW WINTER 2019

17

fig. 47 Two Full HD cameras (60 fps, Full HD 1080p), stereoscopic beam splitter rig, standalone PC, rear projection screen “If architecture cannot describe what it talks about with texts alone, and if we cannot be present in the making of space at all times, we need to show the things.

But this showing, so essential to convincing, is a highly political, fragile process and has become a means of domination. We have to be able to construct ways of representation that enable inclusion, critique and multiplicities, not exclusion and totality.” - Thesis presentation 22 Jan. 2020.

Fabian Puttinger, Reality doesn't need me. → p. 3 Photo: esel.at – Joanna Pianka

fig. 46 Circular Garden (hortus conclusus). A circular structure of greenhouses creates an experimental area for natural processes to play out without human control. The collage Wald shows the view onto the old subway tracks that will be overgrown by the garden’s vegetation, expanding its natural network into the periphery. Ferdinand Klopfer, Stadtverwaldung. Learning from Beuys? → p. 1

fig. 48-49 Co(r)alescence. What might it become Landscape Study. Florian Berrar, Lucas Fischötter, RAUMPARK – Faux Terrain Vienna → p. 1

18

REVIEW WINTER 2019

fig. 50-51 Stills. Sokuseki Kitchen. Rebecca Merlic, TheCityAsAHouse, a visual novel → p. 3

fig. 52 36 to 62 Degrees, Christina Ehrmann, Christopher Gruber.

Into the Heat → p. 3

REVIEW WINTER 2019

19

fig. 53 A Total Deforestation.

An urban fire raged on the 11th of May 2019 and destroyed the entire roof and upper apartments of a 215 metres long apartment building in the 11th district – a total deforestation. But from the flames emerged a landscape interrupted by high chimneys, usually invisible but now unveiled. Black soil is the catalyst – little by little, plants emerge, taking over the spaces in between the chimneys. Roots make their way through cracks in the building, chimneys become trees, and from ash new life is grown.

Antonia Autischer, Burning Down the House I → p. 1

fig. 54-55 HITZE Vienna, inhabiting climatic bridges. Site plan and bird's eye view Danube area. Maximilian Pertl, RAUMPARK – Faux Terrain Vienna → p. 1

REVIEW WINTER 2019

20

MICHAEL SORKIN July 12, 2018

The City is a Res Publica.

Positions (e-flux Architecture, 2018) Reprinted with kind permission from e-flux.

The Right to Access to most of the City will be universal.

Everyone will be able to go everywhere in the City that’s Public.

Everyone will be able to go everywhere in the City that’s private that’s open to the General Public.

Private accommodation, hospitality, commerce, and other services, prospects, events, and possibilities offered to the General Public shall be subject to a Determination of Access by the City Department of Public Access.

The General Public is variably multiple and comprised of an unlimited number of Particular Publics.

The differences among any and all Particular Publics that comprise the General Public shall not be infringed.

No Particular Public shall enjoy free access to Private Spaces, such as domi­ ciles, surgical theaters, dressing rooms, psychoanalytic offices, sensory deprivation chambers, occupied toilets, etc., which are reserved to Restricted Publics, notwithstanding that private persons who choose to exclude all Publics from the Private Space over which they—by reason of law—exercise control of exclusion and admission may also be members of certain Particular Publics and entitled to exercise the rights thereof on Public Occasions and in Public Spaces. The legal standing of all Restricted Publics shall be determined by the City Department of Public Access.

Michael Sorkin (1948-2020) is the principal and founder of Michael Sorkin Studio. His practice and work spans design, criticism and pedagogy. Since 2000, Sorkin has been Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at City College of New York, the President of Terreform and Editor-inChief of Urban Research (UR). Michael Sorkin has been part of the faculty at the Institute for Art and Architecture, IKA from 1993 until 2000 where he was leading the design studio for urban studies and significantly contributed to a new direction of teaching architecture at our institute. We would like to gratefully honor and acknowledge the influential work of architect, urbanist and writer Michael Sorkin by re-printing his manifesto for the city. www.sorkinstudio.com

Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Institute for Art and Architecture (IKA) Temporary premises of IKA: Augasse 2–6, 1090 Vienna 1st floor, core A

Certain private interests may favor or disfavor certain Particular Publics in certain circumstances.

Children, for example, may be prevented from entering saloons.

Noisy people may, if their noisiness is voluntary and not discontinued after two or more courteous entreaties, be asked to leave the theater.

Clubs (including affinity associations, universities, discotheques, military units, hang-outs, churches, athletic teams, etc.) may determine their core constituencies and memberships from among relevant Particular Publics.

These Particular Publics may be defined by certain shared characteristics at the

Office: Room 1.3.11, 1st floor, core A Ulrike Auer +43 (1) 58816-5101 u.auer@akbild.ac.at Gabriele Mayer +43 (1) 58816-5102 g.mayer@akbild.ac.at

MANIFESTO

entire discretion of Clubs or the constituent members of any Particular Public.

Among these characteristics are vocation; taste; thermal preference; nationality in all cases in which it shall be a non-restrictive, fully elective, attribute; and tested capacity, including physical, intellectual, artistic, gustatory, and other non-universally shared capabilities and proclivities. These and all other Particular Publics defined by any chosen, acquired, and hereditary characteristics shall not enjoy any absolute rights of exclusion from their Clubs, neighborhoods, or other milieus of any Individuals who do not embody the characteristic descriptors or other qualities of these Particular Publics, should such In­ dividuals wish to be included in the space or activities of any Particular Public with which they do not share key dispositive markers, inclinations, or capacities.

Although all Individuals shall enjoy the right of access to the spaces of all Particular Publics, no Particular Public acting in its collective and aggregated constitution shall have access to the spaces of another Particular Public without consent of the Particular Public with which it seeks to mix and share.

The City will, within reason, take note of all spaces erected, reserved, or utilized by Particular Publics and will, on application to the City Department of Equity by any other Particular Public that wishes to enjoy similar resources, undertake to provide substantially similar spaces that may be utilized by all of the City’s Particular Publics constituted as a single public, viz. as The General Public.

These spaces shall be designated Public Spaces and shall be fully non-exclusionary, with the universal stipulation that such non-exclusionary spaces must be fully accommodating of all constraining Involuntary Difference.

Public Spaces shall, in the main, be equal or superior in quality and availability to the spaces occupied by any Particular Public to which they are conceived as parallel or reflective.

The cost of creating and maintaining these Public Spaces shall be equitably born by all Individuals comprising the People of the City, via taxation calibrated according to means.

For purposes of this calculation and collection of taxes for the establishment, expansion, and maintenance of the City’s Public Spaces, Corporations shall be considered People too. This corporate

www.akbild.ac.at/ika arch@ akbild.ac.at Postal address: Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Vienna, Austria

responsibility shall not be understood to ipso facto confer any other right generally afforded to The General Public, Particular Publics, or Individuals in the City.

The nature, extent, and on-going determination of form, character, location, and uses of Public Spaces shall not be fixed save by the Full Consent of The General Public nor shall any Public Space, once established, be altered or eliminated without similar Full Consent.

Full Consent to both the creation and elimination of Public Spaces shall not be considered effective in the absence of the Full Consent of all living past and present users of the Public Space in question, as well as of all living or reasonably inferred Prospective Users of the Public Space in question. The rights of Prospective Users, including those unborn or non-resident, shall remain uninfringed upon a Declaration of Interest by any two Individuals, a Particular Public, or

by The General Public.

The City will recognize the possibility of frivolous or self-interested assertions of prospective uses in the absence of parties capable of utilizing an unused Public Space within a span of twenty-five years from any assertion of use and shall, upon the application of a minimum of one dozen Individuals, submit the matter to the Court of Prospective Public Uses for adjudication.

Among the Public Spaces that the City shall provide shall be a wide variety of Open Spaces.

Open Spaces shall be freely open to all Individuals, Particular Publics, The General Public, and to the sky.

The Open Spaces of the City may, however, be subjected to reasonable restrictions on use and manner of access but shall not be subject to any restriction of Appropriate Use by time.

Appropriate Uses shall be considered all non-obnoxious, non-infringing uses.

Any restricted or obnoxious uses shall be defined by the City Department of Agriculture and Recreation, and subject to approval by the General Public and the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Open Spaces shall occupy a minimum of 50% of the surface area of the earth occupied by the City’s Legal Extent and, for purposes of this calculation, shall consist entirely of an area located at the original level of the earth’s surface, prior to the establishment, construction, or Mapping of

Chair / Deputies: Wolfgang Tschapeller Lisa Schmidt-Colinet Werner Skvara

the City or any portion thereof, which shall be known as the City Grade.

Pre-existing water bodies within the territory of the City shall not, for purposes of calculation, be considered a part of the City Grade.

Pre-existing communities of flora and fauna, including human communities, shall enjoy the absolute right to remain and to flourish.

In the event that the establishment, construction, or Mapping of the City shall have a material impact on the ability of these communities to flourish within the Mapped Territory of the City, the City shall acquire a contiguous Extra-Territorial Reserve to provide a comparable or superior home for any displaced living ecologies, with the exception of any pre-existing human settlements or habitations, which shall have the right to remain in their original locations forever.

Water bodies added to the City Grade subsequent to its Mapping and Declaration shall not be considered subtractions from the area of the City Grade if they do not, in aggregate, cover more than 10% of the Mapped City Grade which shall be the limit for the addition of water bodies to Public Open Spaces within the City.

No vehicle with a non-human source of motive power, including but not limited to animal, nuclear, internal combustion, electrical, or other sources, is permitted within any Open Space with the exception of certain emergency, service, public transit, and body-augmentation vehicles and devices permitted by the City Department of Access and Mobility. Permitted Vehicles shall be of approved non-emitting, silent, non-aggressive types, and shall conform with any applicable fair trade, labor, and manufacturing regulations as promulgated by the City Department of Equity and the City Department of Environmental Welfare.

A minimum of 65% of the City Grade, inclusive of Open Spaces, shall be planted with trees of species approved by the Department of Agriculture and Recreation, which shall maintain all trees and other fauna and flora in the City’s Public Space.

Any tree that requires replacement for any reason shall be replaced by a tree that maintains or extends the maximum extent of the umbra cast by the original tree being replaced.

The Public Right to Shade shall not be infringed.

Please curb your dog.

Review Winter 2019 Editor: Christina Jauernik Translation: Roy O’Donovan Proofreading: Judith Wolfframm, Roy O’Donovan Design: grafisches Büro