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In this design studio, students will obtain knowledge and experience with contemporary and advanced urban and architectural design processes, in connection with getting to know and exercise development, representation and presentation of an idea to their peers and a public audience.

“Cyberphysical Towers: Speculations on Digital / Physical Facade Patterns”  explores how new and advanced tools, techniques and automation technologies reshape the discipline’s contemporary design processes and its culture of representation. Through the exploration of emergent technologies, we will investigate novel ways of designing  innovative skyscraper concepts and speculate about the role of intelligent facade structures within their contemporary socio-cultural context.

Ultimately, students will develop their own thesis and accompanying techniques to achieve the latter.

The design studio builds on the famous 1922 architectural competition for the Chicago Tribune Tower newspaper headquarters. Widely considered seminal for its global influence on the future of the field, this competition delineated a crucial point in  architectural history, when traditional and progressive groups of architects and designers competed to define the hegemonial future of the architectural profession. The broad range of international submissions inspired multiple future hypotheses on the style of the new “modern age”. While Austrian architect Adolf Loos’ half-serious half-playful skyscraper proposal, for instance, inspired future generations of Postmodernists with their mundane objects, at the other end of the spectrum, Cowell and Hood’s winning proposal, in which they mixed commercial office tower design strategies with French Gothic ornamentation, went on to influence North American skyscrapers until the 1990s.

One hundred years later, as styles and technologies have advanced, highrise designs and concepts have come a long way, most recently culminating in the typology of the pencil tower, super slim highrise structures populating the contemporary city fabric and synonymous for the last decade’s socio-economic conditions. 

But which emerging digital techniques and design strategies will shape the skyscraper in the post-digital age? If High-Tech was the architectural style of globalisation and parametric architecture the style of the then-emerging digital era, can we call today’s style an intelligent architecture, then? Can artificial intelligence and machine learning tools become critical for redefining the building skin within its urban and social context? How can office environments reflect the novel and unprecedented occupation patterns in the age of knowledge economy?

We will explore these questions and develop a range of provocative and innovative intelligent Tribune skyscrapers.

Students will work in groups and present and discuss their material once a week in a desk crit or powerpoint presentation. Work includes research, analysis and synthesis in order to dedeuct and organize one's ideas to form a coherent architectural proposal.

Design research will include mainly digital techniques, presentations and models, with a strong research focus an machine lerning, facade design, and high rise architecture

Students' progress on research, model building, digital modelling skills and design will be constantly evaluated, putting the focus on specific milestones, such as quarter review (end of research and model buidling phase) and miterm review. Students will present their final design to a jury at the end of the year and submit this digital presentation  for grading. Final Grading will assess the quantity and quality of presentation, design, research, renderings and animations.

Lehrveranstaltungsprüfung gemäß § 7 Satzungsteil, Studienrechtliche Bestimmungen.

Reading lists will be provided

Informationen zur Anmeldung zu den Entwurfsstudio Lehrveranstaltungen finden Sie unter: https://www.uibk.ac.at/fakultaeten-servicestelle/standorte/technikerstrasse/studium.html/