LFU:online

• Integrative Design and Systems Thinking

• Design architecture as a network of interdependent systems rather than a self-contained object.

• Understand how living functions depend on and shape environmental metabolisms such as air, light, heat, water, and humidity.

• Translate environmental and social requirements into spatial, material, and construction strategies.

• Environmental and Metabolic Literacy

• Read and interpret environmental data and site-specific conditions.

• Identify metabolic requirements of everyday activities (eating, resting, working, gathering, care, hygiene, (active)wellbeing).

• Develop architectural systems that respond to extreme or stressed conditions relevant to contemporary habitation.

• Adjacency and Collective Design

• Design in relation to others, negotiating boundaries, overlaps, and shared resources.

• Understand architecture as a collective responsibility, where individual decisions have systemic consequences.

• Develop strategies for spatial, environmental, and functional exchange across projects.

• Spatial and Architectural Competence

• Develop coherent architectural fragments across scales, from system diagrams to spatial detail.

• Integrate environmental performance with spatial quality and material logic.

• Test and iterate designs through physical and digital models.

• Collaboration and Communication

• Work within a shared design language while maintaining architectural specificity.

• Communicate ideas clearly through drawings, models, and diagrams designed for collective assembly

• Participate in critical discussions that address the whole system, not only individual projects.

DESIGN BRIEF

This studio addresses the habitation problem in Innsbruck and treats habitation as a shared metabolic system. Students will work together to design a single architectural “organism” composed of interdependent spatial fragments that must exchange resources, conditions, and functions to support life.

Each group is assigned a tile within a larger structure and a living function essential to everyday life –  such as eating, resting, hygiene, (active)wellbeing, working, or gathering. Each tile has specific environmental conditions, resources, constraints, and opportunities. Rather than designing a complete building, students explore/investigate what their assigned function requires: air, light, heat, water, rest, privacy, movement, care. These metabolic requirements, together with tile-specific conditions, become the drivers of architectural form, space, and material systems.

The studio operates as a form of collective world-building. Like constructing a shared game environment, students work within a set of given parameters, but have full agency in how they develop their spatial strategies. No tile is complete on its own. The living system emerges through adjacency, overlap, and negotiation with neighbouring tiles. Environmental systems cross boundaries, functions depend on one another, and spatial decisions have collective consequences.

Architecture is explored as an integrative design process in which living functions, metabolic systems, and spatial organization are developed together. Environmental performance, material and construction logic, and social patterns of inhabitation are treated as inseparable. The result is a shared architectural organism whose form and performance emerge through collaboration, dependency, and negotiated adjacencies rather than isolated objects.

In this studio, students design architecture as a shared living system. Each group is assigned one spatial tile within a larger architectural organism and one living function essential to habitation.

Each group must:

• Understand the dominant environmental conditions of their tile.

• Translate these conditions into spatial strategies and architectural responses.

• Understand the social and spatial meaning of their assigned living function.

• Identify the metabolic requirements that support this function.

• Develop architectural systems that respond to these needs.

• Negotiate adjacency and interdependence with neighbouring tiles.

Architectural living system emerges not from individual projects, but from exchange, overlap, and negotiation between systems.

The studio combines group-based responsibility with collective design decision-making. While each group is assigned a specific tile and a living function, the architectural system is developed collaboratively from an early stage. 

Initial phases allow groups to work independently on analysis, research, and system definition, enabling depth, specificity, and ownership. Very early in the semester, however, the studio shifts into a fully collective working mode: desk crits and reviews are conducted with all students present (including peer-crits, students giving feedback and commentary), and projects are discussed not as isolated proposals but as interdependent parts of a single architectural organism. Design decisions are evaluated not only for their individual quality, but for their impact on adjacency, environmental exchange, spatial continuity, and the performance and habitability of the whole system.

To enable this collective process, students work with shared modeling scales, drawing conventions, and representation standards. Physical models play a central role in testing spatial relationships, system integration, and continuity across tiles. Difference and specificity between projects are encouraged; however, all designs must remain compatible and assemblable, both spatially and representationally. Elements such as floor levels, ceiling heights, circulation paths, and environmental systems must align across tile boundaries to allow movement, exchange, and shared use.

Additionally, representation is treated as a design method in itself: a tool to coordinate systems, align intentions, and make collective decisions visible. Through this process, the studio reflects real-world architectural practice – particularly in complex or extreme environments – where architecture is produced through collaboration between multiple teams, disciplines, and systems rather than in isolation.

Course examination according to § 6, statute section on "study-law regulations".

1. A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander 

2. Investigations in Collective Form, Fumihiko Maki

3. Metabolism in Architecture, Kisho Kurokawa

4. The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, Reyner Banham

5. Architecture climatique, Philippe Rahm

6. The Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa 

7. A Topology of Everyday Constellations, Georges Teyssot

8. The Architecture of Closed Worlds, Or, What is the Power of Shit?, Lydia Kallipoliti 

9. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Buckminster Fuller 

10. Elements of Architecture, Rem Koolhaas

11. The image of the city, Kevin Lynch

Information to register: https://www.uibk.ac.at/fakultaeten-servicestelle/standorte/technikerstrasse/studium.html/