DIA Summer 2024
#interwoven habitats
How to cultivate a new lifestyle that places living, working, leisure, and collective experience in a new relationship with the natural environment? How do we link qualitative living space and density? How to provide openness and intimacy at the same time? The studio will explore the natural environment as an urban living environment, as a basis for sustainable management and as a laboratory for social experiments.
Through collaborative inquiry, students engage with questions about integrating nature and biodiversity into urban environments, as well as promoting collective urban living. Conventional notions of public and private spaces are challenged, with a focus on blurring the boundaries between indoor and out- door environments to foster community engagement and interaction.
DIA WiSe 23/24
#productive horizons
newnow: Productive Horizons critically evaluates the mixed-city concept, particularly in terms of the productive economy.
The studio explores ways to strengthen small-scale urban manufacturing, recycling industries, and spaces for small and medium enterprises within the urban fabric. The primary objective is to emphasise the integration of production within the city, promoting sustainability, reducing transportation related emissions, encouraging circular economies, and ultimately fostering collaboration to enhance the quality of urban life. Promoting production within urban areas should involve its seamless integration into the urban landscape, fostering visibility, establishing connections with everyday life, nurturing its presence, and celebrating its contributions.
DIA SuSe 2023
#collectivize
Collectivity has been a recurring theme in the history of architecture, from the reformist ideas of the nineteenth century to the hippies and squatters of the twentieth.
In recent years, the concept of collectivization has emerged once again as a key aspect of a new paradigm for architecture and urbanism, in which the focus shifts from individual ownership to collective responsibility. Collectivization can take many forms, from the creation of shared public spaces to the development of cooperative housing or mixed-used projects. At its core is prioritising shared or communal spaces, with the goal of promoting social interaction, community building, and equitable environments, while also reducing isolation and creating more resilient and sustainable communities.
DIA WiSe 2022/23
#cityofjoy
Our cities are associated with anxiety, stress, and mental disorders. Yet, there are few signs that our cities are undergoing the transformative, structural changes necessary to promote well-being. To face this challenge and to interrogate the technological promises of our future cities, this studio goes on exploration of the places or atmospheres in the dense urban environments that promote well-being, that bring joy and harmony.
How can we find harmony and the so-needed connection to nature in the middle of the city? What kind of typologies are needed to disconnect in order to reconnect in the daily life, and furthermore what features should these places have? What is the role of architecture in the atmospheres that reinforce the simple pleasures in the daily life? How to create a city with pockets of joy, a city that promotes well-being?
DIA SuSe 2022
#togetherness
Today's urban society is facing great upheavals and challenges. At times of global socio-economic, political, and ecological unrest, we are forced to rethink the ways in which we come together as communities. Architecture must move away from image and monumentality to rather emphasising synergies, rituals, and cooperation, encouraging people to share, connect and collaborate.
Every space has an impact on existing social dynamics. By looking for everyday situations of cooperation, that provides creativity, transference, and transversality of ideas, architects can contribute to reinforce new kinds of collectivity. During the coming semester we would like to challenge students to define spatial typologies that are universal and inclusive for people to coexist and thrive in their plurality, where a diversity of perspectives, backgrounds, experiences, and opinions have a big potential to create innovation.
DIA Showcase WiSe 21/22
DIA WiSe 21-22
#learning
Education spaces have always been seen as the reflection of the society’s stage of development. That is why it is important to seek and define answers to how the processes in the contemporary society could influence spaces for learning.
In view of the current crisis - a global pandemic, protests for racial justice, deepening environmental crisis, a world-wide gender equality fight and multiple refugee crisis, the role of education has never been more critical and uncertain. What would the architecture that facilitates and encourages these social changes be? How do these urgent issues, that the future generations will face, influence the education spaces in the architectural realm? How would the existing typologies evolve, in order to answer the needs of the con temporary society?