Issuu

IOA Institute of Architecture (Ed.) Cover Mira Al-Suradi Special thanks to Roswitha Janowski-Fritsch Graphic Design Jade Bailey Adriana Boeck Emma Sanson Patricia Tibu Published with Gerin Gmbh Wien, Austria 2021

Editors Lisa-Marie Androsch Jade Bailey Zach Beale Adriana Boeck Velina Iantcheva Xavier Madden Emma Sanson Patricia Tibu

Abstrakt is the exploration of concepts, thoughts and ideas. The intent is to develop a unique and diverse perspective into how the future of architecture will be juxtaposed with other disciplines and developed through a scope yet undiscovered, achieved by discussing global, social and technologically pertinent matters.

ISSUE 01

Dissecting aspects of architecture, design and the future through conversations with creatives.

HEALTH With the first issue of Abstrakt being published in the year of the, pandemic it seems apt to take a closer look at the health sector and the role architecture has historically played within health systems, and how this, along with the current pandemic, advancing technologies, increased global life expectancy and cultural shifts, could prescribe a transition in how architecture can influence and accompany a more inclusive, efficient and community - orientated health system. Included in this issue is a discussion with Hani Rashid, in which we talked about how the pandemic has already instigated change and challenged conventional paradigms, and in doing so has provided us the perfect opportunity to reevaluate how we approach design in the context of health. The topic of health is broad: collated within this issue is a selection of design projects that take on the rethinking of some of these, ranging from human body enhancement centres, public medicinal gardens to promote healthier habits, to optimised air flow systems and temporary pandemic structures. In an interview with Jenny Sabin, there is an optimism and drive towards a future of design and architecture through collaboration across various disciplines, inviting the possibility of a diverse discipline that opens up to new ways of thinking and approaching the problems that lie ahead. These are accompanied by a series of thoughts gathered from our colleagues at the IoA, Angewandte, on important factors for architecture in the near future.

In Conversation with Hani Rashid

Student Projects

In Conversation with Jenny Sabin

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pg 14, 22, 32, 36

pg 26

Near Futures

The Future? by Patryk Slusarski

Angewandte Institute of Architecture

pg 20, 34

pg 38

pg 40

Interview

Thoughts

Speculation

Studio

Interview

Mementos

SS20 Project by Leonie Eitzenberger

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hani rashid Interview

Hani Rashid has been the head professor of Studio 3 at the Institute of Architecture, University of Applied Arts Vienna since 2011. He has been a visiting professor at many renowned universities, among them Columbia’s GSAPP, SCI-Arc, ETH Zürich and Princeton University. Hani Rashid is also a practicing architect and co-founder of the New York-based office Asymptote Architecture.

HANI RASHID 10

Hani Rashid (right) Greg Lynn (left), final reviews at Angewandte, 2019 ©Leonard Kern

<1> Hospitals have gone through notable changes since their humble beginnings up to today’s complex constructs. With both medicinal technology and knowledge about human health progresses every day - while the population is growing older and more substantial - what do you see as the future typology of healthcare? Will we still send our sick to the types of special facilities that we do today? This is a question that would have exacted an entirely different response just a few months ago. The global pandemic has been a wakeup call on so many levels, the least of which is the healthcare system itself proving to be deficient and in desperate need of revision. It is now vividly apparent that the current typology of the hospital is cumbersome and quasi obsolete. Hospital planning and facilities are far too rigid and inflexible, especially when it comes to accommodating such urgency as we have seen with the unprecedented COVID-19 global pandemic. These ‘facilities,’ for the most part, are proving to be challenging to upgrade and quickly adapt when confronted with such unexpected calamity and crisis. From the perspective of being in New York City during this period of ‘lock - down, it has become apparent that new questions need to be posed in terms of the significance and role of the ‘hospital’ in today’s society, and how current typologies might be reconsidered and re-invented. The building typology of the presentday hospital has been with us since the Industrial Revolution. A antiquated model predicated on a ‘factory’ paradigm, principally an architecture for housing the process of diagnosis, repair,

and recovery. What is now clear is the need for significant change and the need to formulate new urban strategies alongside new hospital typologies, where communities are served by an efficient and integrated health infrastructure rather than clusters of autonomous and often redundant structures. For starters, an essential consideration in our design thinking should be with respect to the proximity and location of neighborhoods, workplaces, areas of high density and places of high occupancy relative to an overall urban healthcare masterplan, for example. Therefore we might consider the possibility of an atomized and distributed ‘hospital’ situated throughout the city and surrounding environs. Secondly, there is a real need for a ‘plug and play’ approach to any new architecture in this domain. That is to say that extensive healthcare facilities today are predicated on an older understanding of efficiency and are relatively inflexible in terms of adapting to evolving needs and requirements. New facilities should be designed to expand and contract, and to be upgradeable in order to accommodate necessary changes. The

“There is a real need for a ‘plug and play’ approach to any new architecture in this domain. New facilities should be designed to expand and contract, and to be upgradeable in order to accommodate necessary changes.”

hani rashid Interview

ability for new medical facilities to be able to be reconfigured and re-purposed in terms of functionality is something that we can already design and implement today, given the potential of machine learning, AI, robotics and other advanced technologies in both the design and building processes. A third aspect to consider is that all of these facilities, large and small, from clinics to hospitals, need to be both physically and digitally networked and connected. The future of ‘health infrastructure’ will undoubtedly require seamlessness across vast expanses of city space and outlying environs to facilitate communication, the exchange of data and information, and to provide for different types and levels of accessibility, whether we are speaking about remote access or physical connection via distributed facilities or ties to public transportation systems. As architects, the problem is, therefore, how to consider hospitals as simultaneously spatial and digital networks.

“It is, after all, the architect’s role in society to comprehend and thereby translate what is ‘beautiful,’ remarkable, profound, and fundamentally human into the built environment.” <2> Cities of today are housing a majority of the world’s population for the first time in human history while our society is more focused on efficiency and economic

growth than ever before. Now that we are living longer, but not necessarily without less illness in our later years - how do you see our future urban centers tackling the health of its citizens in a more holistic approach? What will eventually need to take hold - and now at an accelerated pace - are new types of lifestyle-oriented ‘medical’ environments, architectural environments that would target the essential front end of healthcare alongside traditional critical care facilities. Primarily, these new building ‘components’ would need to fold into the functional aspects of hospitals. These ‘interventions’ would be focused primarily on preventive care aspects such as physical fitness, nutrition, physiological and psychological therapeutics, lifestyle modification, education, and training. Such an approach could yield outcomes ranging from sprawling campus-like complexes to interconnected small-scale interventions interspersed throughout communities. <3> Within our fast-living societies, more than 50% of the general population in middleand high-income countries suffer from mental disorders at some point in their lives. Improving mental health and well-being has become crucial in the health care system. How can architects and urban planners be integrated into the process of not only treatment but also prevention? Architecture in all of its many guises has always, in one way or another, played an important role when it comes to ‘mental health.’ When architects work with scale and proportion, composition,

form and light and other ‘intangible’ aspects, they are effectively meditating upon and mirroring the human condition in one way or another. The ‘art of architecture’ is effectively manifesting and celebrating what it is to ‘be’ in space. With this in mind, architects must strive to maintain in their work the humanistic aspects of design. It is, after all, the architect’s role in society to comprehend and thereby translate what is ‘beautiful,’ remarkable, profound, and fundamentally human into the built environment. <4> Why is architectural design relevant within the healthcare industry? Architectural design is a process located between the engineering of solutions and the art of accommodating the human spirit. We are well equipped to mediate and negotiate ‘needs’ versus ‘desire,’ and the future architecture of healthcare will require that equal emphasis is put on both aspects. The new healthcare industry will need innovative ‘out of the box’ solutions and ideas for navigating the complexities of a human-machine landscape. <5> As we head into an uncertain future, how can science and the human come together in design? The next wave of the human-science equation will undoubtedly involve AI, robotics, machine learning, virtual and augmented realities, and above all, massive data sets augmenting hyperconnected societies and cities. For architects, the near future will compel us to rethink our approach

“Our recognition of the importance of nature alongside the increasing challenges to the natural environment, will necessitate the need for us to develop new skill sets to be able to produce agile sustainable and intelligent solutions in symbiosis with nature.” to the built environment on many levels. Primarily technology-based aspects, as mentioned, will force us to question the very notion of design itself. Our future design processes will become more intricately linked to new technologies and their formidable capabilities. Designing with AI, for example, will become a routine process in which we will expect the technology to optimize infinite variations and generate optimum solutions. Working in AR and VR will undoubtedly become a seamless and integral part of our design processes. Data and societies will inevitably become wholly intertwined, thereby producing entirely new approaches to our future urbanism. Our recognition of the importance of nature alongside the increasing challenges to the natural environment, will necessitate the need for us to develop new skill sets to be able to produce agile, sustainable and intelligent solutions in symbiosis with nature. The human-machine interface will compel us to develop new ways to express differentiation, cultural nuance, uniqueness, and even a beautiful and uncanny strangeness. interview from Oct 5th 2020 conducted by Jade B, Adriana B., Emma S, Patricia T.

studio hani rashid

Studio Project

SS20 Project by Jade Bailey, Emma Sanson

Medically Induced Apotheosis This design explores the extent to which architecture can play a role in preventing illness. It encourages habitual behaviour towards healthy routines, by constructing accessible and approachable spaces and programmes that provide efficient means of personalised medication, ranging from herbal remedies to prescription medicines. In doing so, it promotes a pellucidity into the pharmaceutical industry and opens up the process of medicinal research and production that is currently unseen. The concept revolves around the future urban pharmacy, proposing its expansion into open clinics for daily access, along with medicine farms and research laboratories to localise the pharmaceutical structure, instigating a more efficient, affordable and accessible pharmaceutical procedure and therefore more trustworthy one, to coincide with a new age of health.

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(1-7) Jade Bailey, Emma Sanson

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studio díazmoreno garcíagrinda

Pre-diploma Project

WS20-21 Project by Oliver Alunovic

Repairing the Future This project seeks out the construction of a ‘Social Condenser’, on an artificial island in Vienna. “Repairing the future” tackles problems contemporaneous cities are facing today: overheated public spaces, an over-ageing society, and solitude. An architecture for different cultures and backgrounds, for different, and contradicting, forms of privacy. An overarching motif for the project is the ageing population: by 2050, it is projected that there will be more than half a million humans over 100 years old, within the European Union. Public space is not fit for the elderly. A study by Arup states that statistically, a person over 80 years, moves 240m per day. The overheating of public spaces is an increasing health risk for elderly. As a lot of ground space is sealed, even park and recreational areas within our cities are facing problems of overheating. The architecture serves as an extension of nature, for our natural surrounding is becoming more and more hostile. This project proposes a microclimatic architecture that enhances the positive aspects of ageing and social life: nudism, cruising, sexual affairs, inter-age communities, gardening, feasts and festivities. The program enhances the existing behaviour on the island while providing spaces for hiding, for being intimate and unseen. It’s a contrast to the open, horizontal nature of the island.

(1) (1-2) Oliver Alunovic

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(1-4) Velina Iantcheva

studio lynn

Pre-diploma Project

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(3) WS20-21 Project by Velina Iantcheva

SHAFTWAY As a response to the present context of a global pandemic characterised by airborne transmission, this prototype aims to accommodate larger flows of people at peak times without recourse to narrow shafts and cabins, and to provide fresh air access thorugh interiors. Furthermore, the demand to open up the circulation core has provided an opportunity to reintroduce the spatial experience of vertical progression in the midrise typology, now anaesthetised by the enclosed elevator core.

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The traditional building core is deformed into a system of shafts that couple the movement of people and air. Winds are channelled from multiple directions, forming two distinct climate zones high airspeed circulation areas and low airspeed occupiable areas. The perforated envelope of the shaftway is considered as an inner architectural facade - a porous interface simultaneously orchestrating views towards the interior along the journey of the building occupant, creating a mechanical vertical promenade, and diffusing or extracting air.

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present futures Thoughts

“Shift in paradigm, Strangers, Resource - The shift in paradigm for whom we are planning for—the global population is aging—according to the UN, by 2030, the number of citizens aged 60 years or over is projected to grow by 56%, a figure which by 2050 is expected to double again, to a total of 2.1 billion seniors worldwide. By 2050 it is projected that there will be more than half a million centenarians (people over 100 yearsold) within the European Union. Public space has clearly not been planned with elderly and weak in mind, and the ageing society will lead to a shift of paradigm, redefining the public sphere with a complete re-evaluation of thresholds, leisure and communal activities.”

“Purple - Not about Olivier Zahm’s Purple Magazine, the purple here should be illustrated as the pastel purple hue of the new iPhone 12, or the layers of light from Turrell’s installation. It’s a color on the last strip of the rainbow, with heartbreaking softness while remaining unstable: in the next second it could be turned either warm or cold. Purple is an attitude we lack so much in architecture, we need purple and we need a much more sagacious, fluid, ambiguous, and inclusive world.”

KAIHO YU

NEAR FUTURE ARCHITECTURE <> KEY ASPECTS?

OLIVER ALUNOVIC

“Collaborative - By 2050, we will already start to see the results of predicted problems caused by rapid climate change. I believe that architects need to be instigators of design solutions for how we continue to use and replenish the world’s resources. History has shown that architecture has always been on the forefront of change, it should continue to strive to pave the way through global as well as local collaboration within and outside of the profession.” ALEX AHMAD

“Cities for citizens - Resourcefriendly, shared and autonomous transportation will naturally lead to cities becoming greener, quieter and more spacious. By keeping the focus on the well-being of the people, technology and transit should be gently embedded into the urban fabric and our daily lives.”

“Cuteness - Think about Koons’ first piece he put together in 1977, Inflatable Flower and Bunny: it has some of the alluring qualities we’ve been craving in architecture, being breathable and reflective, besides also extremely cute. Cuteness is a non-cathartic feeling, it’s faint yet has strong power. Different from other aesthetic categories, cuteness is something that affirms you, it gives you a degree of abstraction that makes you realize nothing happens without you.“

ADRIANA BOECK

“BEAUTIFUL” “TRANSCULTURAL” “RESPONSIVE”

XAVIER MADDEN

“Omnipresence - We will witness a paradigm shift in regards to what we call architecture – on all scales, materials and systems. We will learn to consider things to be an architecture across the realms of physical and virtual, from microscale to hyperscale.”

“LIGHTWEIGHT FLEXIBILITY” “REAL SUSTAINABILITY” “COMPELLING FORMS OF BEAUTY”

JAN KOVARICEK

”Space-time synchronicity - We will have the means to perceive and experience space and time (relations) differently. We will be living another level of synchronicity. This will have tremendous repercussions on architecture and generate other kinds of spaces.”

BAERBEL MUELLER

“Reacting - The need for flexible spatial programs and response capacity to virtual systems will require an architecture that is proactively responsive. Again, the biggest challenge will be not to anticipate human action but to support and provide diversity through spatial configurations.” GEORG POPP

FLORIAN MEDICUS

“Conviviality of cultures – Migration will occur on an unprecedented scale due to climate change. It is up to the inhabitants of the Global North to understand the cultures, skills and experiences that migrants bring with them not as a threat to host countries, but as an enrichment. The role of architecture will be to spatially moderate the conflicts and appeals, contrasts and enticements, i.e. to design ‘osmotic spaces’, places of possible conviviality. Conviviality of humans and non-human nature – zoonotic pandemics will have shown us what a big mistake the systematic colonisation, suppression and subjugation of non-human nature was. We will have to give habitats back to nature - not only to those life forms that are obviously useful to humans, but also to those whose role in the resilience of the highly complex system of nature is not yet understood. This means that we must not only radically limit urban sprawl, but also invite nature into cities and architecture. To shape this process, architects will expand their responsibility and professional profile as designers of space and become designers of policy”. KARIN RAITH

“So let’s say we are 50 years into the Anthropocene and we have not yet completely devastated the planet to such an extent that life for our species becomes untenable. Architecture will need to be responsive to environmental imperatives (as it should already be today) – most notably, building will need to rely on a material culture that can manage its waste, that is durable beyond an obsolescence imposed by markets or industrial standardization, and that performs in harmony with the environments that it interacts with. I sincerely hope that architects will have a hand in some of the necessary social, political, and economic reforms that seem all but inevitable as rapid urbanization, resource scarcity, and precarious politics continue to be mainstays of our time. This will require the field to define itself anew, to reconsider its priorities, to acquire and invent new skills, in an attempt to understand how a spatial practice can help redefine public and civic values, and create programs that cultivate inclusivity and community.” GREGORIO LUBROTH

studio hani rashid

Studio Project

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SS20 Project by Oskar Heslyk, Monika Kalinowska, Qian Yu

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Makeshift Great Again “Makeshift Great Again” consists of a core hospital building and an expandable makeshift hospital. The design is a fully functional outpatient hospital which is predesigned to quickly expand into a larger structure to deal with a rapid growth in patients over a short period of time. The core building is a campus of medical facilities, an open and userfriendly experience for patients, visitors and staff. In a pandemic situation, the hospital gradually shifts into a closed system. Circulation paths of different user groups are separated to minimize the spread of disease whilst maintaining efficiency. The prefabricated makeshift parts are imagined not to be a single solution but rather a greater global collaborative system.

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(5) (1-5) Oskar Heslyk, Monika Kalinowska, Qian Yu

studio lynn

Studio Project

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WS20-21 Project by Tobias Haas, Joyce Lee

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One Way Choreographies

(1-4) Tobias Haas, Joyce Lee

This project provides a system for controlling flows by matching one-way choreographies for a healthy environment in pandemic scenarios. The prototype uses outdoor veins that cut through the mass of the building to enhance air exchange and direct people. The choreography of the circulation is led by the strict narrative of a one-way system, to maintain distance and avoid crossing between people. The system provides a vertical outdoor promenade with a clear separation between upward and downward movement. Horizontal shortcuts connect the two trajectories. The key principle behind the ventilation system is the Venturi effect. Wind is captured through large apertures, the geometry of the wind channels tapers, therefore the air speed is increased. The strategy of the ventilation concept is to match the velocity with the program and occupation to achieve a balanced level of comfort. To make social interactions in pandemic scenarios possible, gathering spaces are matched with zones of high air exchange, located along the atrium and the air inlets. (4)

jenny e. sabin Interview

Jenny E. Sabin is founder of the Sabin Design Lab at the University of Cornell (NY), where she engages in fundamental research across disciplines, collaborating with a number of scientists to innovate new materials and adaptive architecture. Using computational design and digital fabrication, she touches upon issues of sustainability and resiliency and in her own architecture studio she takes concepts, materials and strategies into application.

Jenny Sabin with her own self-produced PPE mask ©Jenny Sabin

JENNY SABIN

<1> You have been working closely with implementing biology into your designs and your lab. How did you get into this, as it is quite a specific direction? How does it integrate with spatiality and spatial design in your opinion and your experience? In terms of how I got started, I have always been interested in the inter-relationships between arts, technology, and the sciences. But I continued to deepen those questions and struck up some early collaborations and friendships with biologists and material science, while I was at Penn. So, it started with shared interests, but then also, about forming bonds and trust with people who come from different disciplinary backgrounds. In terms of my spatial practise, biology is inherently spatial. Nature provides models that are very ecological and were formed as the product of dynamic conditions. Materiality, geometry, geometry patterns, compliance, program, even history, everything is inextricably linked in this scenario. And that is about space and spatial practise. I have never been interested in simply scaling a beautiful form that’s found in nature, but to look beyond that image and to look at the processes and the relationships as a template, a dynamic template for thinking and looking in design. There are numerous examples throughout history of people in design looking to nature not just for its inspiration but also as a way of thinking about the dynamics of form and how force flows through upon. So, for me, there is no difference, what we are looking at in biology, is for me inherently a spatial paradigm.

<2> Is the knowledge you have from biology still a main influence in your current work at your lab at Cornell University? Yes, absolutely. We are doing some really exciting work with incorporating designing with specific sequences of DNA to achieve material effects and specifically, right now, we are working with fluorescence and that’s in collaboration with a biological and environmental engineer. We have developed a series of ceramic tiles through the manipulation of microscale patterning through 3D printing. We have been able to develop different types of signatures in light conditions based on how DNA has been devised. So, in the context of programmable matter and working directly with biology - that has been very exciting. There is another project we are working on with a mechanical engineer, who has expertise in mechanics of bone formation, specifically human bone formation. So, we have been working with him and his engineering students, which has contributed to some really exciting outputs to develop designs for 3D printed ceramic bricks based on the geometries and forms and structures that come out of how the bone develops. Imagine a brick wall being something completely different, that takes loads efficiently. So, imagine a wall being very dense at its base where the loads are the greatest,

“Biology is inherently spatial. Materiality, geometry, geometry patterns, compliance, program, even history, everything is inextricably linked in this scenario. ”

jenny e. sabin Interview

but as you move up it becomes increasingly porous. Our bone structure and the way that nature designs with holes, which seems a bit counter-intuitive, presents some really great models for considering how we might build not only more efficiently, but in a more resilient fashion. So those are two current examples of how we are working with biology and putting DNA to work. All of my work in my lab continues to work across disciplinary boundaries and to bring in electrical engineers, computer scientists, material scientists, biologists. I think that is not only relevant now - it is the future, it is the only way of collaboration across and between and in an interrelated way with others and alternate disciplines; it’s the only way we are going to begin to address a crisis that we are facing now. (1)

<3> The Operation PPE initiative, using 3D printing and laser technology to produce desperately needed protective equipment, was a very fast response to the current situation - the pandemic crisis. Do you feel this has affected the way you work and your future professional endeavors?

I think for me the most exciting thing to see come out of the initiative, outside of the fact that we delivered close to 30,000 protective face shields to front line workers in a very expedited fashion, was the way we did it. And this notion of informal fabrication and the power of a network working together is, I think, really fruitful ground. One 3D printer is not going to do much, but if you have 300 participants, many of which have architecture offices or labs with multiple printers, then you can really make an impact. So, the power of this on-the-ground, bottom-up, resilient network can then respond to other types of needs. I think that is a pretty interesting area to look into, because it kind of moves away from this DIY outlook to one that is about collaboration with multiple entities working together to innovate. I also think it’s a pretty powerful way of designing, to bring together all these minds and work on a common problem. I am excited to push that forward and continue the work on PPE designs. So, it hasn’t only been about production and the volume that we needed to achieve, but to put our design skills to work. What started out as a few labs at the Cornell campus, including my own, and the digital fabrication shop within our college, grew into this vast New York-based cluster that then inspired other groups such as Alvin Huang at USC and beyond the States. So, to see these regional clusters pop up, to then initially produce PPE and deliver that to the front lines, was amazing, but now also to see what they are doing and continuing to work on this is pretty exciting.

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(1) PolyBrick 2.0 - project by Sabin Design Lab (2) Printing PPE masks at JSLab, Cornell University ©Jenny Sabin

<4> Speaking of cross-disciplinarity, it seems even easier than ever before to jump from one thing to another. Everybody can basically learn everything from the internet. How do you think the role of the architect has been changing and is going to change if we continue going into this realm of interdisciplinarity? Well, I think it is not about learning everything. I really fundamentally believe that you have to have a disciplinary core. You need to know what your area of expertise is, so that you can be effective in your collaborations. And to know what you don’t know. For me, it has never been about turning my students into pseudo scientists or the scientific collaborators into pseudo designers, but to come to the table together and to innovate on questions and problems that span our disciplines. There is so much data and so much information out there in the world, especially as you said in the context of the internet, just with what we are

bombarded with all the time, it makes it all the more important that you really know where your ground is, that you really know what your area of expertise is. And in architecture and the way that you are taught, and the way we work, I think we offer an expertise that is increasingly relevant in the context of these types of collaboration. We see the relevance of design in so many different pockets. We are able to synthesize across a set of complex relationships and questions to form a plan and to implement it and to move forward. That’s what we do, we work with constraints and we work with people. We have always done that but we haven’t necessarily gone in the ways that we are striving to do now.

“It is not about learning everything. I really fundamentally believe that you have to have a disciplinary core.”

jenny e. sabin Interview

“We see the relevance of design in so many different pockets. We are able to synthesize across a set of complex relationships and questions to form a plan and to implement it.” I just encourage you and anyone who listens in on this, to reach out and to push yourself to areas that might be a little uncomfortable, to venture to department lectures that are not just your home base and to open up dialogues. Because you guys are really needed, your work modes of thinking and working across problems, I think that’s really necessary. And that’s something what I found with the Operation PPE initiative. Being able to bring those skills; not just because I knew how to 3D print or had a lab with 3D printers, but I was able to bring a way of communicating and working across design questions in an effective way. I do think, who we work with and our role is shifting, but I think really in an exciting way. The kind of myth of the soul, that the architect is the soul author of a building, the big architect, the capital A, I think that is finally starting to go away - thank goodness. It has never been that way, so why should that myth continue? But I think our relevance on what we bring to the table is ever more important.

“Push yourself outside of environments that are comfortable to create synergies and to create new opportunities. Because the world is changing at such a rapid pace.”

<5> What do you believe is critical to take into consideration when designing with the future in mind? Well, I think one thing that is very critical is to always keep at the forefront, that design inherently is about change and adapting to change. But I think the speed of change that we are experiencing right now is unprecedented. As I said previously, it is your time right now, I tell this to my students. Collaboration is the answer. It is absolutely the answer: working with friends, colleagues, experts in other disciplines, and to really push yourself outside the spaces that you find to be comfortable, and to not just talk to architects, but with biologists, with material scientists, and see how they think about what you are working on. It is incredible what can be spawned in just a course of a conversation. Push yourself outside of environments that are comfortable to create synergies and to create new opportunities. Because the world is changing at such a rapid pace, the political, socioeconomic, health, environmental complexities, and crises that we face, they really demand that initiative. interview from July, 8th 2020 conducted by Adriana B., Patricia T.

“All of the work in my lab continues to work across disciplinary boundaries and to bring in electrical engineers, computer scientists, material scientists, biologists. I think that is not only relevant now; it is the future. It is the only way we are going to begin to address a crisis that we are facing now.” Jenny Sabin

studio hani rashid

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Diploma Project

SS20 Project by Leonie Eitzenberger

A Hybrid for Enhancement This thesis project can be seen as a speculation of architecture as a human-enhancing performance facility in order to optimize the mental and physical capability of the human form, through the simulation of extreme thermal and climatic conditions and the celebration of science and human-supporting technology.

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(1-3) Leonie Eitzenberger

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present futures Thoughts

“New practice models/ re-acquiring creative agency - With regard to built projects, the scope of work architects do as a portion of the total building project is perhaps smaller than what it could be. The scope of the architectural services we have to offer has a direct effect, not only on our capacity to generate revenue from projects, but also the degree of creative authority we have on a project. Architects should incorporate areas of specialization and project development to within the scope of their deliverable architectural services. Basically, we should get more skin in the game.”

MICHAEL TINGEN

“SURREALISM” “VEDA” “OVEREXPOSED” SERGE DELIRE

“Descendance - The ability to descend from the perception of architecture as a problem-solving agency would be practiced more. Architecture might finally detach itself from its political or cultural variables. The very ‘paradigm shift’ might simply be a turn where architects do not establish full control anymore, but resiliently act as contributors instead.” GAKKU JUMANIYASOVA

“Meticulous - In the days of technology advancing illimitably, Architecture is the integration of systems in order to respond to human comfort. Apperceiving and fixating on the balance of the elements in order to optically discern their consequences is essential.”

WITCHAYA JINGJIT

“Architecture should be caring, nurturing and connecting. Our actions have a direct impact on the global environment, yet they do not necessarily visibly affect the private living sphere and therefore we remain unkind. To raise the awareness of our behavior towards the space which nurtures and shapes us, to create it responsibly and in connection to nature.” MIRIAM LOESCHER

“DIFFERENTATION” “COEXISTENCE” “DIGITALIZATION”

ZHIYI ZHANG

“Contextual shift - The ongoing conversation of creating or harnessing co-existing environments (e.g. ecologies or households), if put into practise, will have vast consequences for how we go about our everyday lives, it also will alter how we understand and execute sustaining our soils, water, air and with that ourselves. We need to acknowledge a shift away from current dependence, to provoke polyvalent habitats where prevailing exterior conditions can’t be the predominant context anymore. We need to establish a new temporal duality within our built environment. The transitioning of climate-zones is going to play a major role in how we orient future building strategies and re-code the term ‘contemporary architecture’. What we nearly always tend to forget as we are so objectively technology driven, is the fact we can entertain and embed the role of the human, as well as most objects alive, in response to changing conditions within the built environment.” SIMON HIRTZ

“Customization - Confronting the cities which lose their identical nature. Tracking and monitoring our behavior based on our digital profile, leads to multiple variant capture of the cities, a capture that might not exist in one’s and overlaps with another’s. An entire shift and calibration in people’s perception of reality.”

“Dynamism - An architecture that is no longer bound to the physical framework of reality. Where the word “inhabit” gets replaced by “immerse”. Where it is more interactive and less dictating. Results in cities which are in constant change, each time being rendered. An architecture that has succumbed to the global platform of VR and its physical layers must resonate with the digital content.”

SABA MAHDAVI

“Strategic - It slowly grows with time. The construction process intertwines from the beginning with geometry, form, and spatial organization. ‘Making of’ assembles future users. Final spatial outcome shifts from fractured design phases into a symbiotic and interdependent whole. The construction site becomes as fascinating as the design itself.” MAGDALENA GORECKA

“COMMON SENSE” “COMPROMISE” “INTROSPECTION”

PATRICIA TIBU

“Mindfulness - Careful, sensitive treatment of the space and its inhabitants, including all the species to which one is exposed during a design process, is tangible in the architecture implemented. An integration of the embedded biodiversity, a respect for the changing climates and an appreciation of the rituals and rhythms performed in this place should be taken into consideration.” CARMEN EGGER

“Divulgent traces - Architecture should endeavour to create and provide for a fabulation of ecologies, via predictions, speculations, facts, truths, non-truths, empirical truths, literature and the fantastical. Instigated by the ecological crisis we currently find ourselves submerged within. This forces us to relinquish predetermined thoughts and ideals of design composition and intent. As materials used become relocalised, design processes exceed in analytical efficiency and climate’s shift, the way in which architecture is interacted with, designed and constructed will enter a feedback loop of new configurations, necessities and constraints, in an effort to move towards a neutrality that does not succumb to capitalist gain and attempt to regain an ecologically sustainable footing.”

JADE BAILEY

“Empath - The architecture will take responsibility to mediate the intertwined and complex relationship between us and the environment. The designers will have to place themselves in the shoes of the future dwellers to better understand what they would feel while applying empathy-driven thinking towards the other living creatures and plants that constitute our surroundings.

TOMS KAMPARS

(1-3) Anastasia Shesterikova and Yannik Kaiser

studio lynn

Studio Project

SS19 Project by Anastasia Shesterikova, Yannik Kaiser

MADRID POLYSTERY “Madrid Polystery” by Yannik Kaiser and Anastasia Shesterikova looks at the possibility of creating a mixed-use project that facilitates a sense of community through architecture that focuses on different aspects of health. It stands in contrast to a multitude of recent mixed-use developments which are geared towards boosting the economy through consumption (of goods and/or culture) and the increase of productivity by positioning living and working in close proximity to one another. Under the assumption that in the First World more and more of the basic needs are going to be covered in the near future and therefore new personal and social values can gain importance, health can have the opportunity to shift from being a basic human need to being a catalyst for a new social connectivity. That means that the understanding of health will shift from the concept of fast repair to a holistic, ongoing process and will have the ability to influence community and architecture.

(1)

Yannik and Anastasia want to update the typology of monasteries to modern times to explore an architecture, which deals with the creation of a community with a focus on mental and physical health.

(2)

patryk slusarski

SEPTEMBER 2050:

speculation

FIRST COREBLOX PROJECTS FINISHED

JANUARY 2050:

FLOATING CITY SPOTTED Inhabited floating mass spotted on the Timor Sea, Australian Navy is put on standby. From the aggregation of departed ships, boats and barges, a diplomatic vessel asking for passage through to the Coral Sea. The world’s attention turns towards a floating city hosting 1.5 M people of different nationalities. Their internal trade is conducted only in Bitcoin cryptocurrency. See also: Youtuber KayseaMR makes a virtual tour across the floating city! Wow, they have it all! The spokespeople of the unidentified city, called the BC City (ed. BC BitCoin, one of the cryptocurrencies banned in 2032), are claiming to be on a diplomatic mission to save leftovers of Tuvalu, Kiribati and several other islands left alone on the Pacific Ocean. Read more… A special committee with diplomats from the majority of Oceanian states will gather for a special conference to resolve the matter of passage for the mysterious city. While still waiting on some more news from the politicians, we will present some information that was extracted by TwitchDetectiveTM several years ago.

The first housing estate, fully designed and generated via Coreblox, is opening this week. The families will move into the new neighbourhood already know each other from the game, as this is where they met in the first place. Blob-shaped buildings interlocked with diverse plazas used by specific inhabitants. The design of BloxyHills was directly influenced by players’ actions in the Coreblox environment. “A quite amazing experience, I met my partner in Core and here we are now, who would have guessed? The house is just how we designed it!” - commented Ray Micholozky at the opening ceremony. Ray and her partner Charlie indeed met in the Coreblox environment in the summer of 2042. It was just three years after the England legislation and housing market opening towards AI-generated technical data for private investors. The housing from the game wouldn’t be possible without “long-term Brexit implications” said Tod Lewith, architect. Asked about the current state of architecture and building industry, he commented that “surely, Boris Johnson didn’t predict this devastating news while pushing ‘Get Brexit Done campaign from 2019’.” Back in 2039, due to the lack of influx of migrants from Eastern and Central Europe there was a high demand for some professions that led to ultrahigh costs of labour in the areas of construction management, planning,

and the medical sector. In response, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ben Foster, presented a bill to the House of Commons allowing wider usage of artificial intelligence in the mentioned disciplines. Despite protests from Labour Party representatives, the bill passes both chambers and leads to the unlocking of the construction sector. As some professionals try to look at those decisions with a certain distance, we ask the supporters what their opinion is. “We shouldn’t be surprised that people who grew up with the possibilities to play and even earn via Roblox or Core platforms would be interested in something that transfers a very familiar part of the digital world into reality. I think it’s a great opportunity for anyone who is looking for symbiosis between the two worlds”, says Aleksandra. Her work partner, Shaun, seconds her: “It’s already a standard for medium-size corporations to be present entirely in VR. In a sense, those people work in an environment, that is predominantly digital but anchored in networks of servers. I think it’s wonderful to make those digital dreams come true and if it is through a game, well that seems even better as it’s easier to reach potential customers this way.

Aleksandra Belitskaja and Shaun McCallum of iheartblob are Scotlandbased designers, who have developed an integration between the digital play platform Core and real-time physics simulations that make structures produced in the game structurally stable. See also: How the success of The Epic Games has influenced us after 15 years of its existence? Just 17 years ago, the market battle between Roblox and Core was finally over when a deal was struck that made Roblox part of the Epic Games franchise. Tim Sweeney commented on a decision that “was financially demanding, but it’s the only way such enterprises as Epic Games can counter the monopoly of Gabe Newell”. Two years later, The Epic Games Company merged Roblox and Core into one environment - Coreblox… Read more…

In short: History of the BC City TwitchDetectiveTM source: TwitchDetectiveTM

2032 Bitcoin value skyrockets, leading to a series of withdrawals in its monetization politics across the US and Europe. 2033 Series of protests from Bitcoin users and crash on a housing market, leads to the ruin of people who based their mortgages on cryptocurrencies, evictions follow. Reddit group r/blockchainsociety: series of wannabe engineers, artists, programmers, architects and other working people decided to stop cashing out their Bitcoin wallets outside the group after the crash. An internal exchange market for 1.2 M people is created. 2037 Based on an idea from u/Glaskoone, a test batch of 120 individuals try building their own habitat. With the help of students from aFA Association Vienna, a basis plan for a rafting city is carried out, the city is docked temporarily in Cagliari Cruise Port.

2039 Sardinia can no longer host a city with a separate economic system. 2039 The Sardinia Italian can government no longer host votes a city in with favour a separate of the special economic bill, allowing system. PM Italian Mateo government Berlusconi votes to deal in favour with newly of the coined special“intruders” bill, allowing through PM Mateo a series Berlusconi of decrees. to dealOn with the 22nd of June, the BitCity newly called “Intruders” with a leaves series Cagliari of decrees. withOn thethe help 22nd of of Frigate June, the Admiral BitCityMakarov leaves Cagliari of the with Russian the help Federation of Frigate Admiral Navy. Western Makarov commentators of the Russian Federation view this action Navy.as aCommentators hard attempt by onthe theimmortal West view Vladimir this action Putin as atohard secure attempt influence of in the immortal global Vladimir internet. Putin to secure influence in the global Internet. Two months later Zach Birchhorn of Tesla Two months announces laterthe Zach completion Birchhornof aofTesla Teslahabitat announces on theTesla East habitat Coast. Tescity being finished leaves the at the shores East of Coast. Florida. News Tescity ofleaves life in both the shores settlements of Florida. is being Newspart of life of in a public both settlements debate for the is next beingthree partmonths. of the public debate for the next 3 months. 2042 seriesofofdisappearances disappearances 2042 ASeries in inCentral Central,and EastEastern EuropeEurope and theand the USA. USA. Nobody Nobody pays pays attention attention to to similar similar situations situations in in thethe rest rest ofof the the world. world. TheThe TwitchDetectiveTM TwitchDetectiveTM pursues the case in acase in a gets on track of the live liveinvestigation investigationand andtraces tracesthe the disappearances disappearancesback backto tothe ther/ r/ blockchainsociety blockchainsocietygroup groupon onReddit. Reddit.

angewandte institute of architecture mementos

IOA

ANGEWANDTE

angewandte institute of architecture mementos

Dissecting aspects of architecture, design and the future through conversations with creatives.

ISSUE 01

HEALTH

AUTOMATION, FABRICATION AND DESIGN

ISSUE 02

Dissecting aspects of architecture, design and the future through conversations with creatives.