Winter 2023/24

TERRITORIAL STRATEGIES AND SUSTAINABILITY

 SE Seminar WS 2023/24

The seminar on territorial strategies as part of Integrative Design with a focus on ‘extremes’ is an exploration of the pressing challenges of our time: climate and social crises. The seminar engages with a thought-provoking selection of texts from “Year Without a Winter”, “On the Emergence of an Ecological Class”, excerpts from “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Global Warming”, “Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene” and selected works by Rachel Armstrong, Saskia Sassen and other influential authors. “Year Without a Winter” by Dehlia Hannah takes participants on a speculative journey about the impact of extreme weather on our environment and encourages rethinking the role of architecture in addressing ecological challenges. In the memorandum “On the Emergence of an Ecological Class“, Bruno Latour argues for policies that prioritise the protection of our livelihoods. Excerpts from “The Uninhabitable Earth“ by David Wallace-Wells, a controversial book on the climate crisis, expose the consequences of inaction amidst the many challenges and encourage design considerations in terms of integrative design. “Staying with the Trouble” by Donna Haraway adds to the discourse with an excerpt of ecofeminist ethics that intertwines culture, nature and technology. Rachel Armstrong’s visionary texts address bioinspired architecture, synthetic biology and living technologies. Saskia Sassen’s contributions open up ways of understanding the complex dynamics between urban space, globalisation and social inequalities that can be crucial to understanding how to design just territorial strategies.

Methods:
Artistic exercises between the treatment of the seminar texts and own text blocks will form the basis for a small exhibition. This intersection of discourse and artistic expression offers an integrative perspective that aims to encourage participants to approach today’s challenges of shaping an environment from different perspectives.

SHAPES OF WATER

E1 Design Studio WS 2023/24

"Water is the driving force of all nature” 
“Wasser ist die treibende Kraft der Natur.” 
Leonardo da Vinci

The starting point for the first design of Integrative Design - Extremes is dedicated to the topic of water and thus focuses on a central building block of life. The design studio “Shapes of Water” is to explore water systems, global and local water cycles and their ecological parameters and place them in an architectural context of a self-developed design programme. The aim is to engage with water as a resource, to be inspired by the different circular systems, physical forms of H2O and cultural narratives. Three quarters of our planet’s surface is covered by salt or fresh water, the atmosphere is permeated by clouds, and there are large areas of ice at the poles and at high altitudes. Water on Earth is thus interconnected and inseparable in all its forms. Due to this ubiquity of this material, its importance must be assessed as correspondingly valuable. Water scarcity and pollution, floods and other extreme situations caused by water, weather or ice movement cycles being thrown off course and becoming a problem for people and animals worldwide are to be understood as a call to action. A built environment must actively contribute to problem solving and this is also the responsibility of architects and designers.