Innsbruck: foundations and the city, 2011–2019

Between 2011 and 2019 the Institute of Urban Design at the University of Innsbruck was where the lab’s interest in parts was taught before it was written, and where Rasa Navasaityte, research associate at the Institute from 2012 to 2016, built a foundation curriculum on composition. The foundations came first: Orientation, the basic design course, introduced 52 first-year students in winter 2011/12 to composition through material problems, the broccoli, the croissant, the potato, and the paper strip. Form and Design, taught by Navasaityte from 2012, made the principle explicit. Its brief of 2012/13 set eight exercises on A3 sheets, drawn in pencil with every solid painted in black ink: a solid figure and a void figure, a void within a solid, a poché figure from two voids, fields from identical and from varied figures, and finally a figurative field in three dimensions. The method is Gestalt theory, the relation between figure and ground as the basis of any formal approach in architecture and urbanism, read through Ungers, Eisenman and Aureli. Each year closed with an exhibition: Solid-Void / Figure-Fields (2013) and Line, Surface and Volume Aggregates (2014) at Die Bäckerei, Part to Whole Aggregates (2015), Elemental Aggregates (2016) and Composing Stripes (2017) in the Architecture Building.

The design studios carried the same questions to the city. Figure and Ground (E1, 2012) examined the block, the row, the villa, and the mat building as extremes of urban form and sought the types between them in a morphological matrix; From Object to Field (E2, winter 2012/13) followed Ludwig Hilberseimer in inscribing urban intentions into single objects. Navasaityte’s E1 studios then took housing, the simplest typology, as a problem of the many. Urban Interiorities (2015) worked at 1:500 on the grid of New York. Inversed Manhattism as an Urban Textile (2016/17) turned the logic of the grid, in which the building is an extrusion of its plot, around: what if the building produced the ground, a horizontal settlement off the coast of Manhattan where, coming from the sea, no ground exists? Between the Parts: Living at the Regent’s Canal (2017) moved the question to London, where the surroundings of the canal were turning from industry into a mixture of cultural and residential uses, and stacked the housing into a vertical urban textile. Each studio ran through three steps, the analysis of existing housing, its abstraction into a three-dimensional element, and part-to-whole studies of one and many ordered by O. M. Ungers’s seven diagrams, and ended in photomontages and a physical model on the site; the 2017 results were exhibited in the Architecture Building in February 2018. Second-year urban design exercises continued the series to 2019.