Welcome to Vienna Colonies!!

Studio Matias del Campo

Colonizing Vienna

Dear Students, consider this blog your new home. PLease post here regularly about the progress of your work. Pictures, text, plans.

Here is also again the studio brief, whenever you are in doubt about your projects direction refer back to the brief.

Explorations into the nature of biological colonies as a design technique for housing.

Preface

The city of Vienna is about to cross the 2 Million inhabitants mark,  in this respect the city municipalities are looking for strategies to provide sufficient housing for future inhabitants, without expanding the city limits. Vienna has seized the pole position at the Mercer survey for the city with the highest standard of living in the world, four times in a row, and is very keen to keep the high standards up. To meet this challenge the city hall has formed a task group consisting of urban planners, architects, designer, artists and thinkers to speculate about the possibilities to densify Vienna, without losing the character. Roofscapes form part of the strategy, as do infills as well as replacing postwar structures to provide higher living standards.  In this environment, the studio explores a design technique that borrows the biological behavior of colonies to speculate upon qualities such as repetition and difference, density and component as well as the sensibility and affect of high density populations. Populations in this extent form the basic building blocks of a bottom up approach which defines various scales of the building: from detail to compartment, from apartment to the agglomeration defining the entire building. This procedure allows for Variation within the apartment sizes whilst maintaining specificity and consistency in the design morphology.

The project is comprised of an apartment building with a minimum of two different apartment sizes in combination with a Kaffehaus with alternating day and night program. By day primarily the groundlevel is utilized as a traditional Vienna Kaffehaus. The Vienna Kaffehaus is on track of becoming part of the UNESCO World heritage, it forms a specific part of the cultural Indentity of Vienna. The Studio project seeks to find contemporary means of expressions for this century old institution. By night the Kaffehaus and its underground levels transmogrify into a Dance Club.

In correspondence with the global studio approach of biological colonies the issue of the scale and enclosure is specifically scrutinized with the scale of the main rooms of the Kaffehaus. Two alternating approaches are explored: The scale of individual members as agent for the definition of larger spaces, or the forming of enclosures by amassing populations of small scale components.

A traditional Viennese Kaffehaus: The Café Sperl in 1060 Vienna.

Design Technique

The main aim of the studio is the exploration of opportunities lying within the field of biological colonies. The colonies, as a main theme of the studio, represents the driving force for a twofold speculation.  One layer of this speculation is rooted within biological behavior of colonies. The discipline of Biology refers to Colonies, from the Latin word colonia, as the agglomeration of several individual organisms of the same species, forming a collective tissue living closely together. The explanation of this behavior is generally related to a mutual benefit for the individual members of the colony, such as stronger defenses or the ability to attack bigger prey.

In terms of architectural argumentation we can consider colonization as an opportunity to occupy niches in the urban ecology. Colonies in Biology, such as Barnacle colonies and Mussels colonies serve as study models for possible approaches. These models show the behavior of the population of entities that can be reflected within the design approach, additionally this natural models demonstrate a specific behavior that will become crucial for the results of the studio: They are not of monocultural nature but are comprised of a combination of species, that finely form a continuous texture.

Colony of Barnacles on a rock.

Vienna site

The site is located in Vienna’s central districts, Innere Stadt, at Stephansplatz 2. The urban tissue in the area consists of a mix of historic buildings, Gothic, Baroque, Biedermeier and the Gründerzeit era (late 19^th century Historism), postwar rationalism and some rare dots of contemporary architecture form the amalgam of the urban texture. The site is located right at the Stephansplatz, opposite the Gothic cathedral, at the very heart of Vienna and nucleus of the city. The site runs exactly along the line of defense of the former Roman Castrum, which is considered the first formal settlement of the city.  In order to avoid the Musealization of the inner city, the municipalities in Vienna are highly interested in increasing the number of apartments in the area. The project, which is embedded tightly into the historic tissue, combines apartments on the upper floors with the program of a Kaffehaus/Club in the lower levels of the building.

Late Gothic pulpit of St Stephan, Vienna

Schedule

MID REVIEWS : 10/16-10/17

FINAL REVIEWS : 12/2-12/4. Tentative. To be Confirmed 

Bibliography

Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; Or, Practical Aestheticsm, Oxford Univ. Pr., 1862

Manuel de Landa:  Philosophy & Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason, Continuum 2011

Gilles Deleuze, Difference & Repetition, Presse Universitaires de Paris, 1968

D ´Arcy W. Thompson: On Growth and Form

Ian Bogost: Alien Phenomenology

Studio Hours

Monday 12pm -6pm

Thursday 12pm-6p

GA´s will meet with Students every Wednesday afternoon.

Lunch Talks

Lunch talks are formed by a series of small lectures by Matias del Campo, in order to understand better the symbolic and material culture gravitating around this semesters studio task and topic. Themes like differentiation, proportion scale, advanced modes of material control, and contemporary cultural techniques, form the basis for further discussions in the studio.

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