IKA Institute for Art and Architecture Institut für Kunst und Architektur Master Theses and Dissertations
Review Summer 2024
Master thesis Advisors: Michelle Howard, Luciano Parodi
Catherine Zesch Garage? Plantage! Reimagining a superannuated architecture for food cultivation. More and more people worldwide are living in large cities. According to forecasts drawn up by the United Nations, two-thirds of the world’s population will reside in urban areas by the year 2050. This rapid growth presents us with a multitude of challenges, among which food supply is crucial. The agricultural sector is faced with the task of increasing food production by 60 percent to meet demand. Moreover, in our pursuit of a sustainable lifestyle, our need to know the origins of our food has grown. It has become clear that the distance our food currently travels from production sites to our plates needs to be reduced. Innovative solutions to bring food production closer to urban residents, shorten transport routes, and enhance their efficiency are needed. This work deals with the transformation of vacant or potentially vacant spaces such as garages in future car-free urban areas into food production centres. This approach aligns with our collective endeavour to create more sustainable and environmentally conscious urban food systems. Using the example of the Astoria garage in Vienna’s Josefstadt, this thesis proposes an initial prototype for urban foodscapes in parking garages in a car-free future.
fig. 2
Catherine Zesch, Axonometric Drawing
fig. 1
Catherine Zesch, Collage with raised vegtable beds and added roof structure
Master thesis Advisors: Ines Weizman, Luciano Parodi
Hans Nikolaus Schmidt Tetto 1000 The project »Tetto 1000« 1 is dedicated to the historical craft of stone roofing in Ticino and the Val d’Ossola in the context of the industrial stone quarrying and stone processing that dominates the region today. The technical and spatial planning aspects of the construction, renovation and maintenance of stone roofs were critically examined in relation to their material ecology and their impact on different time scales. Climate, war and energy crises raise fundamental questions: What demands arise from the need for living, for housing? What are the demands placed on a building envelope? This work deals with one of the main components of this envelope, the stone roofs built by the teciatt 2, covered with gneiss and granite quarried in the Sottoceneri and surrounding area. It discusses thresholds in the use of materials that allow an analytical definition of comfort and luxury, thereby aiming to question the relationship between building and living. At the same time, the production phases were analysed at all levels of planning, construction and decay. Stone itself, the physical witness to the costly subjugation of mountains and quarries, serves as a benchmark for placing architectural luxury in an extended economic context. It is considered a vector fig. 3 through the process of construction, maintenance and decay for providing answers to the above questions. The link between this collection of empirical knowledge and the site itself, was a sitespecific, immersive video essay, accompanied by an architectural commentary.
Hans Nikolaus Schmidt, Detail of wall to roof connection
fig. 4 Hans Nikolaus Schmidt, seasonally adaptable emergency roof
1 Inspired by the »tetto 2000«, an industrial product that simulates manually split stone slabs from the outside. The location to which the project refers is 1,000 metres above sea level. 2 A craftsman who restores and rebuilds the roofs and other parts of traditional buildings in the Bavona Valley in Ticino.
fig. 5 Hans Nikolaus Schmidt, Drohnenaufnahme von Fontanaccia, November 2023
Master thesis Advisors: Ines Weizman, Antje Lehn
Lisa Penz Unsteady Ground This thesis is motivated by a great interest in landscapes undergoing significant changes due to environmental factors, be they human activities or natural occurrences. Humans seek to gain control over nature in response to such dynamic landscapes. This attitude led us to believe that a built solution can be found for every natural process that might result in a disaster. I argue that this control is minimal. To explore these issues, I focus on one specific site where the described changes are taking place, and significant interventions are being made to try to secure it. This village exemplifies many other villages worldwide that are affected by environmental change. Throughout the project and this book, the topic of time and scale is present from the beginning. Changes in landscape do not happen from one moment to the next, but are rather interconnected with events from the past, opening up a wider time span, what can be called longue durée. The interconnectedness of time provided by this framework allows the future to be projected from the present. This thesis addresses the current effects of changes in landscape, how far back these events can be linked, and what a future scenario might look like for this village in particular. The village will most likely disappear in the near future. Two reasonable scenarios are the disappearance resulting from a giant landslide that will bury the village under stones and rubble. The other would be the relocation of people, which is already partly taking place. So, the village will either disappear entirely or become a ghost village. This future disappearance that can be observed now, in the present, led to the making of an archive of and for the village. It is one way to see the place across various era and tell a story with the images of the past and present. By analysing the past and the present, a future can be imagined for the village. As some villagers say they are living from day to day waiting for the next step to take place, I argue that an outlook for the future is necessary to cope with the possible loss of a homeland, of losing control over space and place. As the archive formed the basis for the project, it was also very important to bring together different voices with a variety of motivations for dealing with this landscape in order to be able to tell the story of the village. It was important to visit the place on multiple occasions, talk to the people still living there, talk to the mayor, and also to the scientists and engineers for whom the village serves as a laboratory, whose interests certainly differ from those of the politicians and those of the villagers. In the end it was also necessary to find a language to describe all the processes that are going on there, the interconnectedness of time and scale that become movement and to put them into a readable form. The interplay of the archive, the drawings and the video are aimed at enabling us to understand the situation and to open up a discussion on how we want to act upon a terrain that is in constant motion.
fig. 6
Lisa Penz, Exhibition View
fig. 7
Lisa Penz, Collage
Master thesis Advisors: Hannes Stiefel, Luciano Parodi
Marie Eham The Material of Narrative.Towards New Cultures of Spatial Consumption The project The Material of Narrative implements the myth of the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary 1 and uses it as a conceptual device for exploring the question of how to redefine the reuse of abandoned buildings. The myth of the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary originates from the story of a cross-species creature, part lamb and part cotton plant. The many different interpretations of this tale always have in common that the hybrid is connected to the earth by its umbilical cord and only survives as long as nutritious grass is within reach. Tt has been told and retold for centuries, with new parts added and others forgotten. This repetition constantly creates new reproductions. Variations in this myth’s versions arise from differences in location, content, details, and narrative perspective. We are in a climatic crisis, with the building sector playing a significant role. Yet, the reuse of existing buildings is viewed singularly, and often they are demolished for economic reasons. The building chosen to continue the story of the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary has been vacant since 2016. It is one of many so-called »ghost hotels«, left empty for speculative reasons until it can be demolished. A skeletal structure becomes visible upon closer examination, which is not immediately readable from its facade. This building, located at Bauernmarkt 22 and constructed in 1911, is one early example of reinforced concrete structures in Vienna, similar to its now-demolished neighbouring building. The project focuses on the repetitive organisation of temperatures within a building structure and the necessary care work required to maintain these conditions. The hotel rooms will be reopened, guided by an approach that uses the story of the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary as an operational directive.
fig. 8
Marie Eham, Clasp Intervention with Details
+41,40 m +39,80 m
^+39,80 m
+31,50 m
+31,50 m
+24,50 m
+21,40 m
+20,60 m
+17,60 m +16,80 m
+13,00 m
+10,00 m +9,20 m
+5,50 m
+2,00 m +1,20 m ±0,00 m
1 The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary (Latin: Agnus scythicus or Planta Tartarica Barometz) is a legendary zoophyte of Central Asia, once believed to grow sheep as its fruit. It was believed the sheep were connected to the plant by an umbilical cord and grazed the land around the plant (from Wikipedia, Vegetable_Lamb_of_Tartary, retrieved on 19 Nov 2024)
1
fig. 9
Marie Eham, Section
3
4
5
6
8
Dissertation First supervisor: Angelika Schnell, second appraiser: Daniel Gethmann
Waltraud P. Indrist Performative Architectural Photographies The Relationship between Architecture, Media and Politics in the Work of Hans Scharoun between 1933 and 1939
In the work of the architect Hans Scharoun (1893–1972), considered a modernist, there is a specific type of photography that has not yet been recognised by scholars. It is characterised by the fact that it positions the individual photographed, whose identity I was able to reveal for the first time, just as centrally in the pictorial space as the architecture itself. But what role does the human being play within this spatial concept? Consequently, one of the central theses developed from this is that this medium has a communicative intention, which is why I refer to it as »performative architectural photography«. Furthermore, not only can I date the first appearance of this photography to the summer of 1934, but a significant change in Scharoun’s architecture can be observed at the same time. With my dissertation, I therefore show that performative architectural photography can be used as a pivotal means of knowledge for analysing and re-evaluating his transformed socio-spatial understanding from 1933, when the National Socialists came to power, until 1939. Alongside the established methods of analysing the understanding of space, I have developed a specific method (design-by-research) to generate new questions and findings: the »phenomenological-photographic re-enactment«. The aim of the work is eventually to examine the question of how the architect Scharoun dealt with the social-political caesura after the National Socialists came to power. This reveals a variety of alternative strategies that have been investigated only minimally to date, ranging from manoeuvring through and exploring possibilities within the Nazi regime to more active forms of distancing oneself.
fig. 10
fig. 11 Performative Architectural Photography, Rigorosum of Waltraud P. Indrist on 12 June 2024, Photo by Karlotta Lou Bohacz
Rigorosum of Waltraud P. Indrist on 12 June 2024, Photo by Karlotta Lou Bohacz
Dissertation First supervisor: Angelika Schnell, second appraiser: Thomas C. Daniell
Nikolas Ettel The Jacksons Project An Intermedia Framework to Analyse Trivial Yet Telling Urban Remnants in Hong Kong’s High-Density Built Environment
In summary, The Jacksons Project investigates what is still Every day, Hong Kong residents unknowingly pass by one or more accessible and subsequently creates a permanent, empirical »Jacksons« – a unique type of urban remnant found across the database for ephemeral urban phenomena. The project city. Distinct from the more easily spotted urban ruins, historical challenges how architects can utilise new digital tools to relics, or preserved heritage buildings, these seemingly trivial findings have lost their original function over time yet continue to enhance existing ethnographic research methods for a more dynamic entry point to precise documentation techniques. be maintained. This dissertation investigates the persistence of these remnants in contemporary Hong Kong. Drawing inspiration By focusing on the overlooked aspects of Hong Kong, the discrete, non-abstracted urban Jackson type resonates with from an early 1970s Japanese art concept, the dissertation introduces this novel perspective for the first time in Hong Kong. the study’s hypothesis that Jacksons can be found throughout For this purpose, the term Jackson is used to frame the findings. the city, and potentially worldwide. A Jackson (plural: Jacksons) describes an outdated water valve marking in Hong Kong and is here re-appropriated as a prism to gain deeper insights into maintained urban oddities. The Jacksons Project seeks to identify, categorise, and document urban curiosities with a clear physical dimension yet lacking appropriate attention. By employing a research protocol on attentive walking, a sampling protocol, and a photogrammetry protocol, the project establishes a practice-based framework. In this intermedia framework, the process of evolving to make them visible is part of the method itself. The cumulative, interwoven research structure serves as an orientation device to situate this framework to other perspectives on the trivial, such as contemporary practices from forensics, archaeology, and heritage preservation. Nevertheless, the findings’ significance cannot be encapsulated within a single theory, as its qualities and meanings depend on multiple local factors, such as cultural context, individual routines, and maintenance customs. The remarkable diversity of the investigated Jacksons, along with the context in which they are maintained, however, unveil their potential and underlying qualities. Despite differences in size, shape, material, and age, the fig. 12 Rigorosum of Nikolas Ettel on 6 June 2024, Photo by Karlotta Lou Bohacz collected Jacksons share a common characteristic: individual maintenance. This aspect is seen as a manifestation of discreet participation in a high-density built environment. While documenting urban participation is not novel, this dissertation emphasises a new perspective on localised caretaking acts, focusing on temporality, iconisation, and their distinctiveness within Hong Kong. Three selected case studies systematically enhance the understanding of the seemingly trivial Jacksons with representative sizes and observed intensities of maintenance, such as acts of cleaning, refurbishment, and reuse. The noninvasive documentation method of close-range photogrammetry thereby produces accurate, comparable empirical data sets – time documents – for future reference. This serves as an entry point while offering new methods and perspectives for urban scholars to engage with the subject. Consequently, it demonstrates that when the trivial becomes apparent, numerous possibilities arise to explore the ephemeral.
fig. 13 Display of various ‘Jacksons’ on the walls, Rigorosum of Nikolas Ettel on 6 June 2024, Photo by Karlotta Lou Bohacz
Dissertation First supervisor: Angelika Schnell, second appraiser: Lara Schrijver
Paula Maya Strunden bodies, objects, spaces Exploring Multisensory Spatial Perception through Extended Reality Models
Framed within critical, feminist, and new materialist perspectives, this design-based research investigates the impact of Extended Reality (xR) technologies on multisensory spatial perceptions. Building upon the concept of embodied virtuality pioneered by female VR pioneers in the early 1990s, this study challenges conventional dichotomies between actual and virtual spaces, exploring xR’s potential to reveal tacit knowing in architecture through firsthand experience. Drawing on theories of 4E cognition (embodied, enacted, embedded, and extended) and interdisciplinary insights from human-computer interaction, cognitive science, and philosophy, the research develops the educational platform xR Atlas and three case studies termed Extended Reality Models (xRM).These experimental and experiential models—Rhetorical Bodies: An xR Dance Performance, Infra-thin Magick: An xR Ceremony, and Alison’s Room: An xR Archive—examine transformative cognitive effects through embodied experiences triggered by physical interaction with virtual bodies, objects, and spaces. Based on these case study experiences, this study proposes a fifth dimension, termed enveloped cognition, which sheds light on the underlying epistemological frameworks of xRMs and their dual potential as generative tools for creating new perspectives and investigating their operational apparatus. This spatiotemporal layer reveals the dynamic relationship between embodied perception ‘ and cognition through inhabiting hybrid spatial environments. The findings of this thesis highlight the importance of design-based research, interdisciplinary frameworks and critical-speculative perspectives in shaping and conceptualising future design approaches for xR. Furthermore, this research provides an alternative map for exploring the potential and historical aspects of virtual technologies beyond the dominant narratives of the tech industry.
fig. 15
fig. 14 Alison’s Room xR installation, Rigorosum of Paula Maya Strunden on 24 June 2024, Photo by Karlotta Lou Bohacz
Rigorosum of Paula Maya Strunden on 24 June 2024, Photo by Karlotta Lou Bohacz