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In the design course and the combined seminars focusing on structure and material-based design methods students will develop the pavilion’s design. They will develop strategies to translate the concept of adaptability and entanglement into geometry, structure and a strategy of fabrication; thereby questioning the traditional understanding of architecture as permanent and design as self-contained.

ENGAGING FORMATIONS – an urban forum for EAB Prague

The organisers of the third Experimental Architecture Biennial in Prague have invited the Institute of Design/ Structure and Design to realise a spatial intervention in Prague 1 , which will be a public forum for the EAB’s activities and a place for exchange of the public and Prague’s lively contemporary design and architecture scene. 

Since its inception, the Experimental Architecture Biennial has been looking into the future of architecture and the benefits and potentials digital design and fabrication strategies provide for the built environment, the city and its inhabitants. By implementing an installation in public space a wider audience will be invited to engage with the contemporary discourse happening in an around the EAB exhibition and symposium. 

ADAPTIVENESS 

The pavilion’s concept will be inspired by the term “bio-technical” coined by the Czech architect and artist Karel Honzík (1900-1966). It refers to the entanglement of architecture with technology and nature and the inherent vagueness this provokes. For Honzík forms and functions are dynamic, their adaptiveness to specific surrounding conditions generates variability, rather than an ideal or standard solution.

The pavilion wants to expose this inherent ambiguity of architecture: as an expressive structure and spatial experience it will oscillate between the natural and mathematical, designed and self-formed, top down and bottom up. The pavilion will also question our concept of architecture as fixed and permanent; we will speculate about space as a dynamic process of accumulation and dissolution that actively reacts to its surrounding conditions.

ENGAGEMENT 

Students will develop the pavilion’s design, thereby developing strategies to translate the concept of adaptability and engagement into geometry, structure and a strategy of fabrication. The aim is to create public spaces and topographies that actively engage its users and allow functions and performances to evolve spontaneously rather than being planned and pre-defined by the architect.

GRANULARITY

We will investigate an additive design process that incrementally evolves structure and form – not in rigorous layers – but in a very localised and sensitive methodology. Point accumulations as an organisational model offer the possibility to understand and manipulate the process of becoming structure, form and space based on local and on global sets of information. The point-based model also refers to the granularity of the material itself, a mathematical reference within a computational model to the analog realm of the material itself. Individual building elements will be prefabricated, moved to Prague, assembled on-site and finally engage with the city of Prague, its environment and people.

Continuous assessment (based on regular written and/or oral contribution by participants).

Course examination according to § 7, statute section on "study-law regulations"

Will be discussed in the first lesson.

please find further information for application for summer term 2014 on following website:

http://www.uibk.ac.at/fakultaeten-servicestelle/standorte/technikerstrasse/studium.html

Language of Instruction: German/English