Poetics of Space – Architecture is frozen Music

253.I29 Entwerfen // 10.0 ECTS // SS 2022

The clear demand for what is to be created in this design work is: poetry and beauty.

The author and journalist Günther Nenning proclaimed years ago that “beauty is a human right”. If you take that literally, you come across plenty of human rights violations every day. Our country and our cities are getting uglier by the year – where are the poetry and the euphony?

Based on the annual theme “Trespassing Grounds”, possible tasks will be discussed and defined and corresponding plots and places in the greater Vienna area will be sought (and/or vice versa):

1 – elite spaces: Areas that are occupied but not accessible to everyone and that have a very narrow understanding of the city.
2 – undefined urban spaces: areas that have not yet been developed and areas between different dedications.
3 – used spaces: existing objects whose uses have an expiry date (e.g. multi-storey car parks whose construction volume is to be reclaimed due to the slowly progressing mobility transition).

Forward-looking and flexible urban development concepts broaden the basis of interventions and changes in the structure of a city, interim uses set impulses.

From J. W. v. Goethe or F. Schiller comes the saying “Architecture is frozen Music” (in German, of course). The interplay of different actors and clever utilisation scenarios as an impulse generator of urban development is one thing, but without “frozen music”, poetry and design quality, this will not succeed.

(Excerpts from texts by Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergie, Michael Müller and Regula Lüscher were used in the text).