Ways of knowing a Building

By time’s very nature, everything we see or experience is the past. There are different degrees of it, from the immediate past – the traces of just a moment ago – to the distant past inscribed in the multilayered cultural fabric that we experience all around us, history sedimented through reuse by generations. Our routine encounters with spaces, buildings and cities influence our lives and affect us in subtle ways. Without realizing it, we adapt to them, we work and live in them, we bend the present to the past and vice versa, each generation repeating patterns of behaviour, yet each seeking to unlock some new potential. It is not necessarily up to architecture to challenge what is set in stone, but rather to create a timely dialogue with it.

Along with the other art institutes of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, our architecture institute will be returning this fall to its home on Schillerplatz in the grand 155yearold building by Theophil Hansen, set back from Ringstrasse. Into this freshly renovated fortress, the art institutes will squeeze, once again confronting the constraints of working in a historic building. Will we return to locking and unlocking every large door we pass through, return to the monastic, silent walks through empty corridors, measured by the succession of windows and doors to unknown rooms? And where might those gigantic stairways lead us this time?

For our design studio, the building on Schillerplatz 3 is under exploration.

One of the main approaches of our design studio this semester will be to develop a better understanding of and relationship with existing and historic buildings. We aim to foster a sensitive awareness of our resources, learning to think in terms of inventive reuse, renovation, adjustments and additions from within. With the firstsemester students, we would like to engage in a playful dialogue with the heavy old building on Schillerplatz, and to reexplore its spaces – the anatomy room, the assembly hall, the library, the studios, the stairwells, the corridors – by walking through them and opening doors, by observing, reading and drawing, by recording, noting and documenting, by making and interpreting, by discovering issues and conflicts that the building provokes. These topics can be explored through interventions and design ideas. Short design projects will deal with issues of use and the people working in these spaces, conflicts and sitespecific issues, leading to small 1:1 interventions that address how to operate in the building at a smallscale level. Design projects should provoke and address a kind of resistance to the building, revealing potentials and frictions, and maybe resolving some of the latter.

So, upon our return, let’s not fall back into our old ways of doing things! Let’s wander the building and open the doors. We call on all the IKA platforms and teachers to join us in a discussion of our ideas. The studio will emphasize getting ideas out, drawing ideas up quickly, finding the tools for expressing those ideas, and communicating them.

14.00–18.00

Christina Condak Daniela Herold

5 1ST

FIRST YEAR