m--è Luca Mulé
M.Sc., Architecture (TU Berlin) +49 (0) 15258915578 muleluca@yahoo.com www.lucamule.com
Luca Mulé is a Berlin-based freelancer in the fields of Architecture, and both Urban and Graphic Design. He studied Architecture at Politecnico di Milano as well at the TU Berlin where he then later graduated in 2015. Luca has a diverse scope of interests including sustainable and socially equitable urban planning and architecture, among construction sciences and sociocultural anthropology. His final thesis “The Sacral Urbanity Project”, examines the adaptive reuse and transformation of religious buildings in Europe across the diaspora. Luca has had the opportunity to work at various Berlin offices, most recently collaborating with Urban Catalyst studio on the development of “The New Urban Agenda in Action”, a research project which is understood as a discussion tool for the Habitat III conference. In 2016, he worked as a research assistant at Habitat Unit where he managed the “Urban Design Reform Projekt”. This aimed to further develop the Urban design program, its corporate identity and communication strategies.
In 2010, Luca worked for Projektbüro Friedrich von Borries in the exhibition “Klimakapseln” which collected designer and artist works on the repercussion of climate change on urban life. During his studies at TU Berlin he worked closely with Chora City and Energy in different projects regarding the development of sustainable urban strategies.
Personal details Luca Mule Rosenheimerstr. 5, 10781 Berlin +49 (0)15258915578 muleluca@yahoo.com www.lucamule.com
Education Liceo Artistico Statale, Bergamo, Italy September 2000 - July 2005 Specialization in History of Art and Architecture Abitur diploma Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy September 2006 - July 2008 Specialization in Architecture TU Berlin September 2010 - Juli 2015 M.Sc., Architecture
Language skills Italian (mother tongue) German (fluent, C1 TestDAF) English (fluent, C1)
Professional experience Hascher Jehle Architektur Internship 27/10/08 - 31/05/09 www.hascherjehle.de ProjektbĂźro Friedrich von Borries (Raumtaktik) / MKG Hamburg Internship 01/12/09 - 31/05/10 www.friedrichvonborries.de1 CHORA City and Energy, TU Berlin Tutor 01/10/2012 - 30/09/15 www.chora.tu-berlin.de Habitat Unit, TU Berlin Research Assistant 17/12/15 - 14/12/2016 www.habitat-unit.de
Urban Catalyst Studio Researcher 01/01/17 - 01/09/17 www.urbancatalyst-studio.de Bejing Technical University and TU Berlin Contract lecturer 24/03/17 - 05/06/17 Freelancer in the field of Graphic and web-design 01/01/17 -
Software Adobe_Photoshop Adobe_Illustrator Adobe_inDesign Adobe_Premiere Pro AutoCAD Rhino 3D 3D´s MAX Sketch Up Grasshopper (Basic knowledge)
Web - Programming skills Wordpress HTML CSS PHP (Basic knowledge) Processing (Basic knowledge)
Professional skills Team work Flexibility Stress resistance Autonomy
Personal skills Model making Book binding Risograph Printing Screen printing Gocco Printing
M-ARCH-T CI Development TU Berlin 2017
New Urban Agenda in Action Urban Catalyst studio 2016
The Sacral Urbanity Project FG Stollmann SoSe 15
Ruins FG Leibinger / Ballestrem WiSe 14-15
Place Maker Adip / BoĹĄtjan Vuga WiSe 13-14
Meteo City FG Bunschoten SoSe 13
M-ARCH-T CI development TU Berlin, 2017 M-ARCH-T is a new, English spoken, architecture course of study at TU Berlin. Its corporate identity is based on a previous project, the CI development for the Urban Design master program (also based at TU Berlin), and has been adapted and further developed for the new content and its needs. Both projects share the same graphic structures and elements, but differentiate themselves for their communication strategy. The front page of the website is composed by three elements. The side menu, which is a constant element trough the website, the projects gallery and, on the right the profile description of the course of study. All three elements are placed in independent scrollbar columns, a topic that articulates through the whole website. “Corestudies� is the only page on the Website that differentiate itself from the others. While the structure of the page is still articulated in three columns, the colour of the page inverts. This trick is meant to strength the attention on its content and at the same time its became a CI element, which is also present on the front gallery and on the Logo.
www.m-arch-t.tu-berlin.de
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New Urban Agenda in Action Urban Catalyst studio, 2017 The study “New Urban Agenda in Action – Case Studies from a German Perspective” is understood as part of a German contribution to the debate on the tools and instruments necessary for the implementation of the New Urban Agenda. The focus of the study is on the creativity and openness with which many German municipalities, urban regions, and urban networks face current and ever more complex transformation challenges. The looming changes to actor and process-oriented dialogued planning culture in Germany is shown through case studies. The understanding of planning and building culture as a “process quality” increasingly focuses on the roles and responsibilities of stakeholders from government, civil society, business and industry. The case studies show that spatial planning is not a static system, but that planning approaches, instruments and projects must be allowed to dynamically evolve. At the same time, it must be made clear that existing spatial planning principles and instruments in Germany already provide a good framework for addressing the urban-spatial challenges currently facing German cities and municipalities. In this sense, this publication should invite communities and planners around the world to a dialogue on process quality while also identifying specific tools and instruments that are transferable to other urban contexts.
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The Sacral Urbanity Project FG Stollmann, SoSe 15 The “Sacral Urbanity Project” is an investigation focusing on the relation between religion and the secular city and society. The research attempts to analyse sacral buildings that are not considered part of the indigenous society and their relationship with the urban environment. It investigates how such buildings and communities adapt to new environments and if a typological transformation or adaptation occurs. My research investigates if there is a relation between sociological processes and the perception of the physically built environment of the city. This gives rise to a certain question: do sacral buildings’ visibility play a role in integration processes? The results of this research are explored in four different publications. The aim of the first book is to give an introduction to and formulate a cognitive exploration of religion’s manifestations in the city. The research starts with an attempt to define secular processes and how they relate to the form of the urban environment. Following this is a description of immigration flows in Europe and their most recent developments. From the representation of the data, specific patterns emerged which lead to the identification of three case studies. The cities of Berlin, Venice, and Marseille have been furthered explored within a research trip. The third part concentrates on a typological analysis of the mosque, identifying its most distinctive elements, its regional diversification, and defining its relation with the urban environment.
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If the first book tries to be a cognitive analysis of the topic, the second publication represent a more subjective view, and is based on pictures, video still-frames, and short stories made during the research trip to the three cities. This time the relation between religion and the city is approached from a sociological angle. Through interviews with people encountered during the trip, a personal connection with the topic has been made. The aim of the interviews was the examination of three different focal points of sociological research: the personal immigration history, the level of religiosity (i.e. attendance to the main religious events), and the ‘religious topography,’ namely the mental map of personal religious experiences in the city. The term is borrowed from Robert A. Orsi from his book, “Gods of the City,” which he uses to describe the movements and connections, real and imaginary, within and beyond the city, which have a religious value. The intent behind the introduction of the term is the investigation of the relationship between personal religious experience and the urban environment that goes beyond the sacral building. “The Muslims Yellow Pages” is the product of the third phase of research. The publication is an illustrated directory of mosques and Islamic businesses, such as halal butchers or Muslim travel agencies specialised in religious trips to Mecca. The result of this publication has a purely graphical nature and aims to visualize density, visibility, and distribution of Islamic places of worship in the three cities considered by the research project. It seeks to underline their dissimilarities and identify possible topological variations. The fourth publication is a critical reading of the material collected, with the goal of constructing an argumentation on the connection between social processes, such as integration, and the physical construction of the city and the role of its visibility. Furthermore the analysis gives an interpretation of the dissimilarities between the typical and regional characteristic of mosque in traditionally Muslim countries and the European typology of the Mosque. Topic of the analysis would be their connection with the western urban environment, the changes of Mosques social-spacial role and the typological transfer and reinterpretation of those traditional typologies in becoming an abstract representation of cultural heritage.
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Berlin is the starting point of the research. My first observations on the visibility of the Mevlana Mosques in the district of Kreuzberg (image on the top) brought me to a deeper analysis of the Islamic community in Berlin and their houses of worship. On the left side is an axonometrical view of the Al-Nur Mosque in the district of
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Neukölln, alongside the open market. The Merkez Mosque is located in the heart of Kreuzberg, few minutes walk from the Görlizerbahnhof train station. Opposite to the Mevlana Mosque, this prayer house has very little visibility from the street level. Nonetheless the prayer room is one of the most beloved of
the district and also one of the oldest in whole city of Berlin. In the German language this type of mosque is so typical that acquires a specific name because of its morphology, “Hinterhofmoschee”, literally translated, the courtyard’s mosque.
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Venice represent a very peculiar case study. Italy’s immigration history is very young and so are its Muslim communities. In my field trip in Venice i tried to find out how their visibility affects the buildings they pray in and vice versa. On the left side is a still frame from the
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Friday prayer at the Mosque of Benevolence, in Marghera. Marghera is home to the old industrial harbour of Venice, which nowadays can only be considered partly active. In the early 90s, many of the companies shut down their activities, leaving numerous industrial construc-
tions abandoned or without a purpose. Cheap rents and generous spaces attracted many activities and business which are unwelcome in the city centre, such as Chinese discount stores and mosques.
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Despite Marseille’s quite large Muslim community, one of the biggest in Europe, the city does not posses an official Mosque yet. The many makeshift prayer rooms are mainly located in the northern suburbs of the city or in the historical centre, where mosques are under constant police surveillance. Prayer rooms in the city take many different
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forms and are hosted within many different frameworks, from garages and former post offices to shopping malls. Many of the interviews I conducted in Marseille address topics such as the search for multicultural and transnational identity and the transformation and adaptation of religious typologies and their praxis in western cities.
One of the most important considerations I made about such places is the development of an ongoing typological transfer that many prayer rooms undergo, for example during a renovation project. The Islamic house of worship stops being just a place for the care of souls and becomes an object of identity and an abstraction of cultural heritage.
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Ruins
FG Leibinger / Ballestrem WiSe 14-15 The studio task set two primal challenges, first to deal with the conservation of the castle of Hohenlandin in the region of Brandenburg, and secondly to work with a specific type of concrete, “infraleichtbeton,� and to experiment with its structural and architectural potentials. This new revolutionary material is currently in the experimentation phase at TU Berlin. Its consistency allows acoustic and thermal insulation without any additional construction elements, leaving the concrete the only material needed to assure shelter. Once the context of the site was analysed, a few important issues were considered for the development of a project and its integration into its surrounding. First we looked at demographic data and recognized that a strong decrease in the number of inhabitants in the last decades is connected with the rising number of younger people and families that leave small communities for bigger cities. Secondly, we considered the consequential reduction of services offered to the shrinking community and their agglomeration with other smaller municipalities in the area. This leaves Mark Landin municipality in a deficiency of basic services such as education centres, seniors health assistance, and more generally, food accessibility. The concept behind our project tries to deliver on all this issues by re-establishing the castle of Hohenlandin as a leading example for the surrounding municipalities by offering supportive services to the endangered community for the next 100 years. The program of the building will therefore develop and adapt over time and according to new needs. In the first development phase, the building reintroduces basic businesses such as a bakery and a coffee shop. By slowly offering leisure activities such as a youth centre and a bowling alley, it tries to became a landmark for the inhabitants and their needs, before becoming, in phase
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two, the new community hall. Finally, in a third phase, the program of the building will concentrate on the assistance of the senior community and their medical needs. Like its program, the building also slowly grows within the ruins of the castle, and its decay becomes a metaphor for the endangered community. The development of the building and its life span covers over 100 years but its activities do not follow a consistent path, but rather follow a Bell or a Sigmoidal curve, with a short fast growth and a long and slow decay after reaching the peak of development. The growth of activities mirror the growth of the new construction that nests in the structural grid of the castle’s remains. The building is left to its ephemeral destiny and its ruins are kindly escorted to the ground by the new growing “parasite” that occupies its innards. The side walls of the new structure are slightly lean and their size and inclination are custom constructed to receive the heavy stone walls of the old castle. A slow and assisted death. The parasite construction inside Mark Landin’s new landmark is a monolith concrete construction that first of all protects the inner space from the decay of the castle, and secondly, hosts a light wooden structure that hangs on fissures that are moulded within the concrete structure, allowing a flexible variation in the usage of the single buildings. Windows, doors, and other openings mirror the existing structure, preserving the castle’s memory and meaning thorough history.
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1. phase
2. phase
Gerne Klaus, wir treffen uns im Café!
82%
Bevölkerungszahl Friedhof
Apotheke
Landarzt
Kantine
Pflegeheim
Apotheke
Tierart
Plegeheim
Landarzt
Physiotherapie
Gemeindehaus
Kegelbahn
Dorfladen
Landarzt
Apotheke
Pop-up Restourant
Turnhalle
Bowlingbahn Jugendclub Kneipe
Bushaltestelle Bäckerei Café Lebensmittelladen
Endlich ein bäcker im Dorf !!!
Hey Daniel, kommst du heute Abend zum kegeln ?
3. phase
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Verkaufsfläche
Lager
WC
Praxisraum
Wartenzimmer
Lager
Verkaufsfläche
Theke
Personalraum
Dusche
WC
Kantine
Küche
Gemeinschaftsraum
Freizeiträume
Schlafräume
Wartenzimmer Praxisraum WC Theke Verkaufsfläche Lager Schutheke WC Versammlungsraum Multifunktionsraum WC Küche Behandlungsraum Massagesraum Dusche WC Wartenzimmer Praxisraum WC Schlafräume Freizeiträume Gemeinschaftsraum Küche Kantine WC Dusche Personalraum Lager Verkaufsfläche
Lager Verkaufsfläche
Multimedia_Box WC Sportfeld Umkleidkabine Dusche WC
Schutheke WC
Küche Verkaufsfläche Lager
Theke Küche Verkaufsfläche Lager
Theke Verkaufsfläche Lager
On the top is a view of the characteristic agricultural landscape that surrounds the site. Like its program, the building also slowly grows within the ruins of the castle, and its decay becomes a metaphor for the endangered community. The development of the building and its life span covers over 100 years but its activities do not follow a consistent path, but rather follow a Bell or a Sigmoidal curve, with a short fast growth and a long and slow decay after reaching the peak of development (diagram, right).
The growth of activities mirror the growth of the new construction that nest in the structural grid of the castle’s remains. The parasite construction inside Mark Landin’s new benchmark is a monolith concrete construction that first protects the inner space from the decay of the castle, and secondly, hosts a light wooden structure that hang on fissures that are moulded within the concrete structure, allowing a flexible variation in the usage of the single buildings. Windows, doors and more general openings are an exact footprint of the castles structure and in doing so it still preserves its memory and meaning thorough history.
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Opposite to the monolithic hard shell is a light wooden structure that organizes the inside spaces. On the left side is an exploded axonometrical view of the hanging wooden system, which is supported by a trapezoidal sheet.
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Place Maker
Adip / BoĹĄtjan Vuga WiSe 13-14
The 300 meters long hybrid bridge is located between GĂśrlitzer Park and Treptower Park, crossing over the soon to be constructed A100 highway extension. The construction of the highway is a controversial long term infrastructural project conducted by the city of Berlin that has raised a lot of social and medial attentions over the last few years. The purpose of this highway ring belt around the city is to mitigate the traffic pressure in the city centre. To enable its realisation many residential buildings have been torn down and many people have been relocated. Some residents refuse to leave their homes and have started a long legal battle to avoid eviction, which has made the construction time span even longer and more expensive. Therefore, at the centre of our attention as planers was to rethink the role of infrastructure in the city, not as an uncomfortable and ugly necessity, but as something that fosters human activities and improves its environment. Essential for the concept was first the creation of an alien object that would have the capability to become a landmark and at the same time adapt itself to the surrounding environment, and secondly, the development of a program that could raise awareness and interest in sustainability and the redistribution of resources. Based on these concepts, we tried to reinvent the way garbage disposal and recycling works in the city, and the way it is seen and experienced by the citizens. The two vast green areas of GĂśrlizer Park and Treptower Park are
Central to the development of the project is the critical approach to the role of infrastructure in contemporary cities. The building developed reacts to the construction of the ring Highway around Berlin and tries to take advantage of it. Below is a perspective view of the building from Treptower Park.
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reunited by a bridging new generation garbage incinerator, able to eliminate all of the neighbourhood’s rubbish and to produce enough electricity to power more then 50,000 of Berlin’s households, all with minimal methane emissions. The building takes advantage of the new infrastructure placed underneath to manage its logistic needs, namely the import of trash and export of ashes. In doing so unnecessary additional traffic is avoided and the infrastructure is used more efficiently. The top of the building is a green pedestrian bridge, which first of all connects the two parks with a new rich ecosystem of flora and fauna specifically developed for the location, and then offers the possibility to partake in a learning experience about recycling and garbage management trough the recycling centre and incinerator which lie below. The people strolling through the green landscape will have the possibility to choose different paths which will lead them to discover the industrial machinery hiding below them and to learn about them in greater detail. The porosity between the two juxtaposing elements, the park and the incinerator, variates from one location of the building to an other, and sometimes the green landscape dominates the view, while other times it is the pipes and concrete which prevail. The building is composed of two main construction elements, the steel framework and three concrete cores, that breaks through the green roof. The cores represent three essential sectors of the incinerator, the garbage storage bunker, the burn chamber and the gas filtration chamber. These are the only part of the building that touch the ground beside the big chimney on the east side of the building.
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On the left side is the site plan showing the location of the building, joining Gรถrlizer Park and Treptower Park, and bridging the infrastructure nerves. Underneath, three plans of the construction, cutting through the landscaped roof, and the southeast elevation.
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Meteo City FG Bunschoten, SoSe 13
Chengdu counts as one of the most important economic centres of Western China, and also as one of the fastest growing cities in the whole country. The high rate of population growth brought to the city the need for a long term development plan that took into consideration the construction of a third ring and the expansion of the infrastructure system. In the Chinese cities branding system, Chengdu is famous for being the green city and for its perfectly preserved city centre, but the uncontrolled development of the last years created an unsustainable and unbearable environment for its citizens. The goal of the studio was to create concepts for the development of Chengdu’s 3rd ring. With the help of smart materials and smart systems, the studio aimed to develop prototypes that respected the vision of a sustainable city development. After a scrupulous site analysis, we decided to direct our attention on seasonal drought problems and its correlated agricultural damage. The geographical location of the city corresponds to a sub-tropical profile, which means heavy rain in summer and a dry season in winter. We decided to take advantage of this aspect of the city’s climate, and developed a concept whose goal was the collection of water in excess and its redistribution to the inhabitants and the agricultural systems during the dry season. With the help of the TU Berlin chemistry department, and specifically Dipl.-Ing. Daniel Althans, we tested the characteristic and quality of a Hydro-gel called PNIPAAm, which polymerization would allow the assimilation of water within the temperature span of 15 and 27 degrees (the average summer temperature), and its release by low temperatures, specifically between 5 and 15 degrees Celsius (the average winter temperature). PNIPAAm is a highly elastic polymer that, when in contact with water, can expand its volume by 10 times.
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Furthermore, as all Hydro-gels, it can host biological life, such as plants and bacterias, which feeds on its water. Based on these considerations and the introduction of this material as key element of our concept, we developed three prototypes, each one concerning a different scale and a different system of water management. In the prototypes we developed, we tried to reinvent the usage of PNIPAAm as a construction material, one that is an integral and substantive part of the built city environment. We considered the whole surface of the 3rd ring the largest prototype possible. Here we tried to optimize the maximum surface available, in order to collect the biggest amount of water. The resulting surface is an abstract landscape, that represent the best chance to collect water in the city, and is based on average rainfall and wind direction. Through these numbers we discovered that the usage of this material in the urban context would theoretically provide for the city’s water needs and partly cover the agricultural demands. Starting from the biggest scale, we went smaller. The next scale we took into consideration is delimited by an enclosed gated community, or as we called it, “Water community.” In this prototype, the water collected was used to the advantage of only one city block and would not be shared with the rest of the city, contrary to the first prototype. The Water communities would develop new business models based on seasonal water cycles, and sell the exceess water, becoming independent waters industries. The third Prototype is the smallest scale we took into consideration. In this case the material is used to cover personal needs that, for example, concern private households or small business, and with it reveals the smallest practical application of such process and materials in the city. At the last we considered the way this prototypes could co-evolve and proliferate on Chengdu’s 3rd ring.
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On the left page is the city plan of Chengdu in the region of Sichuan, in west China. Its unstoppable demographic growth forced the local government to create a long term development plan which considers the expansion of the city into a third ring. The diagram on the left side shows the seasonal behaviour of PNIPAAm which collects water during the rainy seasons (15째-26째) and release it in winter (5째-15째) to mitigate the regional drought problems.
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PNIPAAm, as is the case with many hydrogels, can host and sustain plants and many biological forms. We tested the material several times to evaluate its physical capabilities, such as resilience, maximum period of water assimilation, and obviously its biological host capabilities.
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The following drawings represent two different urban water management systems. Both prototypes use PNIPAAm to collect rain water. The prototypes on the left function as a gated community, wherein it uses the water collected primary for its own usage and needs. The water in excess will be resold to other neighbourhoods or private citizens for community’s gain. The towers below, on the other hand, represent a more holistic system, which foresees at first the reintegration of the water collected in the system.
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