City Cooling

Vienna is seen as a system of different areas of microclimate. Among them, some island-like areas suffer more from the heat than the rest of the city. The studio works on this agglomeration of warm islands in Vienna. Mapping the heated areas requires the first representation of the character of these islands. In this regard three elements appear particularly crucial: the functions of the wind currents, the possibilities of using recycled water, and the planted areas added. These three elements can be re-organized in pursuit of a realistic dream of large-scale apparatuses that could have a positive effect in cooling areas of the city.

While avoiding invoking any out-dated ideas of ‘nature’, the studio explores architectures of the fake and the artificial in the form of designed enquiries related to the city, the garden and their common histories.

In order to enter the field of possible interventions it is crucial to work with protocols: in this regard such protocols could formalize fragmented, scripted answers to HITZE. Garden towers, wind influence and air-cooling technologies tested at an urban scale can produce different mechanics of urban cooling.

The question examined by the studio looks at a major conceptual problem of architecture as regards its ability to consider issues of a larger infrastructural scale or to transform the small scale rationale of cooling traditions to bigger structures; avoiding a reverential understanding of technology (today sometimes seen as easily capable of stopping or reversing its own effects), the studio investigate in a local framework punctual strategic interventions that can positively affect the microclimate of the warmest areas of Vienna. The questions that are asked will, naturally, be local, accurate and also fragmented, but the answers to them may appear as a fleet of different urban apparatuses related to urban cooling. The extra energy for cooling also opens up another important field of investigation for the studio.

Aristide Antonas Aristide Antonas, Vertical Village, 2016. Copyright Aristide AntonasAristide Antonas, Vertical Village, 2016. Copyright Aristide Antonas

Aristide Antonas Werner Skvara 9

ADP ANALOGUE DIGITAL PRODUCTION