6th Viennese Seminar on Architecture

opening: September 26, 1995, 7 p.m.

6 project groups with the architects:

– Mariano Bayón, Madrid, E
– van Berkel, Amsterdam, NL
– Michelangelo Pistoletto, Torino, I
– Fabio Reinhart, Lugano, CH
– Dagmar Richter, Los Angeles, USA

All Viennese Seminars on Architecture so far have been centered around the topic of “Objects in Space” both as question and result. The 6th Viennese Seminar on Architecture, however, is dedicated to the design of the space in between, between the objects. Today it goes without saying that the public space has experienced changes in its use and utilization, its social, cultural, and technological significance.

“A design of city development and urban spaces in accordance with set and fixed forms is certainly anachronistic. It corresponds to the pre-kopernikan concept of the solar system and the pre-freudian perception of awareness.”- Martin Pawley. The public space on the one hand is seen as a hopelessly sentimental position of city planners and on the other as a no longer needed and endangered space .

This opinion is in conflict with a permanent question on the “design” of this public space, posed not only by planners, architects, and politicians, but by the citizens themselves requesting this space between the objects. They want it to become more attractive, more homely, a place of residence, a safe abode, a point of orientation and identity.

The 6th Viennese Seminar on Architecture: “THE public space” asks the question on the available means for design and the architectural possibilities. Because in everyday city planning we are still discussing the historical and sentimental question of streets, squares, and parks. Their design, their material surfaces, their furniture, their signs and symbols.

Due to the complexity and its communicative characteristics this years Seminar will be different from the past ones. Experts from various fields of humanities, theory and communication studies shall also be involved.

These contributions on the theory of the public space will be conveyed in concentrated form at a symposium at the beginning of the seminar. The speakers will then be available for discussion and the development of the projects throughout the further course of the seminar.