5th Viennese Seminar on Architecture

opening day: September 20, 1994, 7 p.m.

The urban and peripheral open spaces of a city form part of the “cityscape”. Planned and plannable spaces, that must not be processed only according to functional criteria. There is constant exchange, constant superposition between artistic and natural spaces. Different concepts and typologies for “Wiener Freiräume” (the open spaces of Vienna) were developed.

6 groups of students with the architects:
– Pepe Llinàs Carmona, Spain
– Luc Deleu, Belgium
– Adriaan Geuze, Netherlands
– Mark Mack, USA
– Ippolito Pizzetti, Italy
-Martha Schwartz, USA

The public discourse on the urban landscape of Vienna has been inundated with New Age labels such as networking, system, structure, virtual reality in recent years. But, in fact, the desired qualities of the free space were planned in most cases according to so-called standard values so that it would be more appropriate to use terms such as field amalgamation, spacer areas, landscape as merchandise, green compensation. Serious, large-scale projects were not able to go beyond the usual impulses set by commissions.

Thus, the organisation of the landscape and recreational areas of Vienna merely remained a sketch at a projection level. Examples are the repair and design of the Danube Canal in the built-up area – the central waste bin for undesirable activities in a residential environment, the lost chance of linking the Vienna Woods and the Prater meadows by a linear, metropolitan park and abandoning the monopolistic dictate regarding mercantile substrates and art integration along the Danube.

Since the two international gardening shows organised in the last decade, no concrete thoughts have been given to creating a park with a metropolitan design. But, above all, the concept for maintaining urban agriculture in a biologically and ecologically sensible way as well as the threat posed by the fragmentation of its living and working cores have hardly been dealt with in a committed way.

In the general discussion on the transdanubian area, it proved to be fateful that the development process of city – landscape has to ensure a green-belt solution for safeguarding urban free if, in parallel to the building procedure, the vision of the new city dreamed of could successfully be brought to overlap with the corresponding, draining financial strategies.

Year by year, high-quality architecture is created in a great variety at the Remise. But unfortunately, these ideas which, at the same time, are also challenges have been exploited by the City in an all too marginal way. In its anti-academic orientation to urban practice, our architecture seminar, nevertheless, continues to try to find answers to unresolved issues.

In order to counter a mere aestheticism in every-day world, the 5th Vienna Architecture Seminar brought together experts from related disciplines such as landscape history, hybrid design, free-space art, and urban space architecture and drew their attention to hot spots requiring intensive work. The results show above-average commitment and speak for themselves. This time, we hope, they will not wait for an echo by the City in vain. We owe our most sincere thanks to the City, the teachers and the students.