PROJECT MA_WiSe_2019/20 

CLIMATE CHALLENGES - The Measurable and the Unmeasurable

There is a fundamental question today about how to deal with climate change and its effects, a crisis that raises difficult questions for academics and professionals in the built environment. It is an urgent issue that confronts us with the responsibility of architecture in society. What we architects design has a much greater impact on our lives than what people generally think. It is our duty in the university to address the issue from a critical point of view.
To achieve a sustainable society and a built environment of high quality, we could refer, on the one hand, to quantifiable problems: technical, scientific and economic data that can be measured:

- Energy consumption
- Emissions of greenhouse gases
- Temperature increase
- Technical performance of buildings.
- Life cycle costs
- Value

But good architecture can not only be expressed in numbers, it also conveys something immeasurable:

- High quality of life
- Cultural diversity
- Individual and collective well-being
- Social justice and cohesion
- Psychological atmosphere
- Quality of a public space
- Memory of a place

The American architect Louis Kahn, put it this way:

"A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, it must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end it must be unmeasurable."

We will take this poetic metaphor as a starting point to work on the challenges of climate change in architecture.

Objectives:
The work of our group will focus on thinking, inventing, testing architectures in extreme situations linked to the consequences of climate change. Taking different case studies, we can raise awareness about the alternatives of transforming the city, the landscape, the architecture, as a crucial contribution to a built environment of high quality.

Location:
The site is the planet as a whole. Each of the projects can choose a specific location in an extreme climatic situation (current or future).

Program:
Programmatic functions will be discussed in class as part of the intended debate of ideas. The students will work in different case studies, i.e.:

- the boundary between sea and land
- the growing desert regions
- the melting ice in the Arctic
- the flood risk areas
- the forests cut down
- the toxic soil of abandoned mines

The following topics are some of the key alternatives to avoid or diminish the climate change challenges for our near future:

- Preservation, adaptation, reuse of existing structures
- Integration of nature in the built landscape
- Densification
- Public space
- Innovation: renewable energies, materials, etc.

The semester project will be the option of each team: from specific architectural proposals, to large-scale studies, to technical and constructive particular solutions.

Teams:
The research and the project will be developed in teams of two, max. three students.