BUILDING RESILIENCE - LEARNING RESILIENCE – CREATING RESILIENT ENVIRONMENTS
COACH - PROFESSORSHIP AT THE ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS, VIENNA
Design Studio IKA Academy of fine Arts, Vienna
Master Summer Semester 2022
BUILDING RESILIENCE - LEARNING RESILIENCE – CREATING RESILIENT ENVIRONMENTS
The manifold crises that have enfolded in recent years have proven that our current systems are not fit for purpose, be they political, governmental, or societal and will prevent us from continuing to inhabit our planet. Globalisation has allowed us to eat things that come from far away, but also forced us to eat more processed foods that have lost more nutrients that we can imagine. We communicate with entities far away and find it harder to talk the people closest to us or to maintain small networks of mutual support. We make tailor-made buildings and are at a loss to use them when they ultimately become anachronous. This studio questions the idea that constant access to global chains of supply is indispensable and tries to imagine alternative ways of being in the world. It asks.
How would we practice architecture if we were separated from the chains of supply (the internet and data, manufactured and imported materials), we have become accustomed to in the western world? How could this separation foster innovation and perhaps even lead us to a better practice of architecture?
Our work was inspired by our constant and avid reading of “The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity,” book by anthropologist and anarchist activist David Graeber, and archaeologist David Wengrow. Published in 2021 after the sad passing of David Graeber, it challenged every existing paradigm of Human History. While proactively checking themselves and others institutional biases, the authors reviewed all of the evidence available to us about the how humanity behaved in the world and concluded that it didn’t have to be like this. Graeber and Wengrow discovered that we humans have been capable of dismantling systems of governance and reinventing them repeatedly. Furthermore, we have been capable of changing them according to the seasons. The evidence for this behaviour has been around for an awfully long time, it has not become part of our consciousness because of the institutional biases that permeate all networks of knowledge. This shedding of bias was essential in the pursuance of projects in and out of the studio.
Catherine Zesch
PLAN BEE
Diversity is essential for the survival of both human and nonhuman life, monocultures their death knell. To the detriment of the myriad of valuable but subtle non-human interactions, our interest in non-human life is directed towards an obvious contribution to food supply. An example that illustrates this problem is the fate of the bee whose whole genus is endangered. Their role as ingenious pollinators has taken second place to that of some as honey producers. Pollination is essential to food security. Austria’s largest and most important wholesale fruit and vegetable market Großgrünmarkt , is situated close to the Zukunftshof and supplies around 4 million people. The sale of fruit and vegetables takes place in the dead of night under artificial light, senses are deadened and the experience of touching, smelling and tasting is anesthetized. At Dawn an empty concrete landscape remains. My project asks if Vienna's food hub could become a hive of diversity.
Tim Handl
“Evolutionary specialization may prove useless in the long run, if they lead to an over-specialization that cannot be reversed”. Friedemann Schrenk’s observations of the nutcracker people, who became extinct in Africa about 1 million years ago, should warn us. Our architectural practice seems to [over]value specialization, specification and form [resulting in the stasis we observe] over openness, adaptivity and process [necessary ingredients of resilience]. Or as Tim Ingold states with a wink to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: It is to counter this stasis and to replace it with a mode that focuses rather on the processes than their final products, rather on the traces and tool sets - the textility - of making, than the concreteness of concrete. To overcome the stuckness of our practice and to create resilient environments the underlying paradigms need to be reformulated and the barrier between the society which we are in and the real [and felt] experience cut down. My body and my architectural thinking are tools - tools that form the centre of this personal experience.
Moritz Schafschetzy und Friedhold Salzer
The Wall As A Habitat
Based on our common interest in materials, we wanted to create something with our own hands. At the beginning of the semester, we all went on a field trip together to Zukunftshof. A place with the concepts of urban agriculture, culture creation, conservation, rehabilitation and creation of opportunities. The area of Zukunftshof is very rich in clay and loam and paved the way to make clay bricks by ourselves. After many conversations and an invitation from Johannes to create something on the farm, we met there, shoveled clay and transported it to an abandoned barn - outside the farm, in the middle of the fields. We quickly agreed on a format and experimented with the water-clay compositions and eventually to build a wall. A wall that divides the space but is not a boundary for the fauna it contains, and thus to a certain extent becomes a niche or space itself. The wall as habitat.
Dependence and Independence from Global Chains of Supply
Our excursion this semester took us to Ireland, a country whose success story is based on access to global chains of supply. Ireland is a small island on the westernmost edge of Europe, has little natural resources and imports nearly all of its energy. That being said it has recently become one of the richest countries per capita in the world. With the help of a special connection to the U.S.A, enthusiastic membership of the EU, and exceptionally low corporate taxes, it has succeeded in attracting all of the major global hi-tech firms. At the same time there are movements and landscapes that eschew globalisation and embrace the isolation that an island naturally enjoys. Our excursion moved between surreptitious visits to global headquarters where we were politely but firmly asked to refrain from photography through an island without fossil fuelled traffic to a rewilding experiment conducted on the grounds of a 13th century Barony. In homage to “The Dawn of Humanity” we visited prehistoric tombs and natural monuments such as hawthorn tree that is even under protection due to the firmly held superstition that they are beloved of the fairies.
Wide ranging Discussions and Projects
Our discussions seemed never to end this semester and we always left each other with the idea that there was more to say. But we made things too, we produced lived mobilities and habitats, built models and walls, made and repaired tools and places. The projects that emerged can be seen in this Review.
