Postgraduate Program URBAN STRATEGIES

Organisation:: Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien
Ort, Bundesland, Land:: Wien, Vienna, Austria
Typ:: Full-time
Certificate:: M.Sc.
Duration:: 3 Semester/s

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Programme

URBAN TECHNIQUE PoroCity - / Next course November 2012 / application open
Urban Technique constitutes a field between urban planning and architecture. It combines research of the organization of the urban territory with architectural strategic thinking in various scales and operates as a laboratory to re-examine the role of architectural discourse within the urban disciplines. The inclusion of the conceptual power of visualization techniques in the formation of urban projects allows for speculative designs that sponsor a different understanding of urban space and mobilizes its potential. It raises the question if it is possible to be contextual and radical at the same time.

Wolf D. Prix / Reiner Zettl, Andrea Börner
Guests and visiting Professors: Sanford Kwinter, Andrew Zago, John McMorrough among others

Urban Technique is an applied-research based design course that seeks to re-examine the role of the architectural discourse within the urban disciplines. Each course starts from its own theme which serves as the topical lens through which students develop individual positions. In three consecutive semesters strategies are dealt with in theory and design practice in order to develop solutions and concepts. The exploration of the theme is covered in lectures, discussion panels and workshops in small, team-oriented groups. Particular importance is attached to the invitation of experts from different fields to enrich the discourse and widen the repertoire of approaches. Guest lecturers will present individual but related topics, which will be investigated in open discussions or by carrying out short assignments and projects.
New dynamic modeling techniques give a new meaning to developing and testing ideas towards different sets of realities. The project and its strategic potential with the respective digital and analogue methods of communication serve as the common ground for discussion. A particular city or urban condition serve as the contextual framework for testing the ideas (thesis project) in the third semester.

Current Course (Diploma presentation March 29th, 2012)
PoroCity / Beirut study the Lebanese capital as an urban model. In collaboration with the Lebanese American University the program will focus on the capital of a country, which has a very particular history of modernization and consists of a multiplicity of cultural ambiances. PoroCity will start from Walter Benjamin’s and Siegfried Kracauers notion of porosity as a model of the mutual penetration of public and private life and its potential of reading the city as multilayered system in continuous change.
“PoroCity” refers to the measure of void space in a material sense, but also connects to concepts of improvisation, permeability, elasticity and resilience regarding the urban environment. It allows a description of spatial conditions that comprises both, the actual and projected physical state and the intrusions caused by local micro changes. Introduced in the 1920ies as a critique of modernist urban planning, the notion of porosity reconnects infrastructural means and civic life. Porosity allows for all ranges of scale, planned and unplanned built form, public and private realms as well as orchestrated and informal courses of action.
Although globalization has blurred the conventional categorization of urbanity along geographical and cultural parameters (the European, Asian, Colonial, Islamic, African city) local specificities still frame the various ecologies of a city (geographical, political, economic, ecologic, cultural, etc.) that might sponsor particular policies, fostering specific spatial, infrastructural and social constellations. Gaps and open territories in their respective organization of public and private also in their relationship with infrastructure provide areas that allow manoeuvring within and among the various levels of encroachment.
With the contemporary software tools and dynamic modeling techniques developed in the urban strategies lab, these tangible and intangible dimensions will become operative in case studies that will redefine common notions of density, spatial patterns and connectivity. The thesis project in the third semester will test the results of the research and the case studies implementing them into the urban fabric.

Current Course (started Nov. 2011)
As a sequence to the course that researched Beirut, PoroCity/Lisbon continues investigating the political implication of spatial porosity in relation to strategies based on improvisation, permeability, elasticity and resilience. Reflecting the most recent economic situation of countries on the fringe of Europe, we will look at Lisbon, the capital of Portugal with a focus on instability as thriving moment for future development. New dynamic modeling techniques will sponsor a different understanding of urban space and mobilize its potential.

POWER PLANT CITY / Next course November 2012 / application open
Power Plant City investigates new urban planning parameters and strategies for urban models based on energy. New techniques towards a better energy performance and new solutions utilizing renewable energy sources are key for securing a sustainable future. With buildings being responsible for the largest part of energy consumption, the built environment has the greatest potential for providing solutions. Energy therefore emerges as a new paradigm for city planning. The city will become its own power plant, utilizing natural resources such as the sun, wind, water and the earth.

Wolf D. Prix / Karolin Schmidbaur, Andrea Börner, Reiner Zettl
Guests and visiting Professors: Brian Cody, Bernhard Sommer

„Power Plant City“ is a teaching - and research-program, based on the assumption that the active and passive energy balance towards a sustainable metabolism has become one of the most important criteria for urban development and architecture.
Ecological parameters like climate, humidity and temperature inside and outside, wind, CO2 emissions as well as the material inherent so-called „grey energy“ now carry more and more weight in planning activities. We put forth that ecological sustainability must be active (in addition to and as opposed to passive), which means that we need not only save energy, but proactively find ways to generate energy naturally – utilizing sources like sun, water and wind.
Power Plant City is implementing decentralisation of urban infrastructure, especially new interfaces between buildings and urban structures: a set of collectors and elements of / for storage, flows, distribution, which all include metaphorical, functional, technical and formal dimensions. From now on it is to be expected that cities – existing urban structures as well as new developments – will look very different in a wider sense. The manifold determinants of city planning and the interdependency of their intrinsic urban forces require a new integrative modeling of new, robust urban structures. The planning parameters relevant to be studied are block sizes, diversity, geometry and patterns; street orientation, width and layout; building heights; thermal mass storage; vegetation, water bodies and green belts and their ratio and integration within built structures; density and ground coverage ratios of built to non-built, façade orientation and façade depth. Existing or “found” factors such as climate zones, specific geological and geographic features, as well as studies of vernacular (energy intelligent) architecture in different climate zones are parts of analysis and determinants of design.

Scales of research and programming will be: the region, city-structures, architecture and urban elements, interfaces, nodes (Knoten) and the shift between these scales. The out-coming urban patterns and prototypes should include flexibility and the potentials for self-organisation as well. In order to develop planning strategies, which are generally meaningful, rather than specifically only for one location, comparative case studies for sites in distinct climate zones will be developed.
Power Plant City offers a platform for updating knowledge in the most relevant issues, individual research and the development of counter-intuitive approaches in urban design solutions (thesis / diploma).
Teaching and practice will include software for modelling, simulation, scenario development, methods of cooperative and strategic urbanism and parametric design to analyse, re-configure and visualise urban patterns and forms, in relation to all now available data-bases. The challenge is a interactive network of human and non-human (agents) actors within urban systems and spaces, transgressing the out-dated separation of nature versus technology, local versus global, science versus arts, - following and describing the lines / paths of all the new (and old) hybrids and quasi-objects.

EXCESSIVE
Next course starts June 2012 / application open / fall entry October 2012 possible
Many of the ambitions revolve around the topic of excess as a redefinition of beautiful lust and—misfit aesthetics of exuberance and sophisticated conditions of arousal. If design is typically derived from an expertise related to form and proportion, a theory of mutation is possibly an advanced critical stance toward formal traditions. A theory of excessive form is not a rejection of the formal traditions but an extension of them. Further, navigation through the topologies of excessive form can be understood as an intensification of more traditional formal strategies.

Head: Hernan Diaz Alonso
Teaching: Steven Ma, Jose Carlos Lopez Cervantes
Guests and visiting Professors among others: Klaus Bollinger, Greg Lynn, Wolf D. Prix, Marcelo Spina

EXCESSIVE investigates strategies in architectural design. Working in a laboratory environment, students will develop knowledge by investigating and applying the possibilities of emerging theories, as well as testing new design territories such as scripting, biogenetics, genetic codification, new materials, and cellular systems. Studio projects, alongside related design workshops and seminars, will focus on the challenges of developing and expanding the domain of emerging technologies in the design and production of architecture.

How boring has perfection become?

Evidence of this lies in the fact that our contemporary design obsessions are based on an appreciation for the perversity of mutant form, a taste learned from the movies and set to work on architecture. It is produced in the act of design – in the focused sensation of pointing and clicking that is more like painting than engineering. Image-forms are the product of speed up and slow down, slice and blend, fuse and separate – repetitions of scenic rhythms learned from a lifetime of being awed by cinematic affect.
Historically, architecture begins with a concept, an overall strategy or some kind of pre-meaning. This course proposed a re-examination of the possibility of form generation as an autonomous act. As an extension of this interest, student research focused more specifically on the degree to which autonomous geometrical forms could be interpreted as an accumulative mutation, or as having latent affective potential. How might architectural order be productively mutated (if not entirely mutilated) by the organizational influence of formal and geometric effects? Advanced modeling software generated the potential for what students began to see as a productive migration away from conventional notions of totality (typically thought of in planometric terms) and towards a reconsideration of architecture as something less determinate. Students began to think of micro behaviors as being less quantifiable in nature and more as the product of specific qualities, in particular the notion of space and form as an embodied experience. Additionally, design involves a translation between form and image. More than 'textuality' or even 'iconography', its very form is a secondary function of how it performs as an image. Some may see this as a triumph of superficiality over depth, but it is also an intensification of the conjectural and fictive logics of design, of its ability to mobilize a social imagination and with it a series of potential futures. This course saw this as a real and complex demand that global network culture places on producers of architectural content.

Every Year the course will focus on a specific topic that would provide means to the advance and mutation of the emerging paradigms of Aesthetics as the main vehicle for the evolution of the autonomy of the discipline.
Special workshops and guest will support the effort of the studio. The studio proposes to re-examine the possibilities of form generation as an autonomous entity. In the context of these conditions, the course will focus in the generation and production of mutant micro behaviors that will accumulate to create species from systems. This program is comprised of three semesters, nevertheless, it is not compartmentalized in three topics, and instead it will be organized as a continuous played out in three acts.
Current Course
The topic for the 2011/2012 course is Museum and Exhibitions, focusing on the development on a new conception of specie that can replace type; we will focus on the iconicity and cellular contraction for a new character and aesthetics for a seminal presence in the contemporary culture of architecture.

Wolf D. Prix
Academic Director

Target audience

Generally, the program emphasizes an experimental, yet methodical approach to urban design. It encourages the participants to develop and refine their individual skills.
The program is designed for both recent graduates and design professionals that hold a degree in architecture, regional planning or related disciplines (Bachelor, Diploma or Masters). Successful completion of the program will lead to the academic title of Master of Science in Urban Strategies.
As part of the Master’s program the students will be participating in the Angewandte’s lecture series, archi- tectural events, exhibition and take advantage of further academic opportunities at the Angewandte.

Emphases/Curriculum

Urban Strategies Postgraduate Program / Three Semester studying in Vienna / Master of Science in Urban Strategies

Established in 2005 at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and directed by Wolf D. Prix the Urban Strategies Postgraduate Program offers a three-semester full-time post-professional master studies. The program is designed for both recent graduates and design professionals that hold a degree in architecture or related disciplines. Successful completion of the program will lead to the academic title of Master of Science in Urban Strategies (MSc in Urban Strategies) and comprises 50 semester credit hours, which equals 90 ECTS credits.

Rather than being bound to a determined curriculum, the program emphasizes an experimental, yet methodical approach. Providing an international and interdisciplinary platform the goal of Urban Strategies is to encourage the participants to develop and refine their individual skills and push the envelope of their discipline.

To facilitate a wide-ranging dialogue between teachers and students workshops are held by cutting-edge architects and theorists from well-known international institutions. Along with Wolf D.Prix and faculty, Jeffrey Kipnis, Sanford Kwinter, Eric Owen Moss, Patrik Schumacher, Petra Blaisse, John McMorrough, Hani Rashid among others have been teaching our students throughout the years, and became frequent visitors of the program.

Urban Strategies currently offers 3 different full time MSc Courses; Urban Technique combines research of the organization of the urban territory with architectural strategic thinking and operates as a laboratory to re-examine the role of architectural discourse within the urban disciplines. Power Plant City investigates new urban planning parameters and strategies for urban models based on energy. With energy as the emerging new paradigm for the urban environment the city will become its own power plant. Excessive focuses on strategies of architectural design, exploiting a theory of excessive form – not as a rejection of the formal traditions but an as extension of them.

In addition to the master courses Urban Strategies offers annual summer schools and travelling workshops as intense design training.

Admission/Entrance requirements

Total fees approx.:	€ 15.000

The application needs to contain: your cv a portfolio complete application form motivation letter

Languages
Language(s) of instruction:	English
Going abroad:	not possible

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Organisation

The University of Applied Arts Vienna is home to more than 1,000 students, many of whom come from other European and overseas countries. The range of courses available at the school is unusually extensive, encompassing architecture, fine art (painting, tapestry, animated film, graphics, sculpture, photography, ceramics), stage design, design (fashion, graphics), industrial design, media design, art teacher training and restoration. It is precisely this diversity of artistic disciplines, which is also supplemented by a large number of scientific subjects, that serves to create the very special Angewandte atmosphere.

The fundamental concept of the university as a venue for critical reflection concerning personal thoughts and actions, and as a place where questions are more important than so-called patent recipes, is alive and well at the Vienna University of Applied Arts. Studies at the Angewandte are not limited to the mere communication of artistic techniques and skills. The development of individual creativity and theoretical and conceptual reflections on the artistic oeuvre are at the heart of the learning process. Students at the University study and experience art not for its own sake, but as both the starting point and medium for communications, in which the analysis of parameters relating to the meaning and effectiveness of art within a social context plays an established and significant role. The encouragement to develop a creative vision and the facilitation of artistic experiment in combination with a declared commitment to technical excellence and conceptive brilliance are the basic elements of the quality standards, which apply to students and teachers alike at the Angewandte.