Institute of Architecture and Design / TU Vienna

The Institute for Architecture and Design at TU Vienna is part of the Faculty of Architecture. Its focus is design oriented research and teaching covering the fields of housing, public buildings, design methods, spatial design and construction.

At TU Vienna, the research VIPA-project is be coordinated by the department of Building Theory and Design. Among the research areas of this department are hybrid architecture and didactics of architecture related to design teaching with a focus on e-learning. The department has been coordinator of a major e-learning project funded by the Austrian government with 300000 Euro between 2001 and 2003.

The research-oriented teaching at the department is organized in a 10 ECTS – module “Building Theory and Design Methods”. The module offers a survey of the history and terminology of the most important design tasks related to public buildings, gives insight into current design methods in selected fields with the help of guest lecturers and offers a critical discourse of different methodological positions (amongst others, computer aided and cooperative / collective methods, architecture algorithms, etc...).

The design courses at the department give students the chance to go beyond traditional individual creativity towards a new contemporary design practice that regards design as data and process control

Besides methodological questions, the changing requirements of architecture constitute another starting point of research activities. Key factors are the differentiation processes taking place within contemporary society; the alteration of governmental institutions under conditions of globalisation; new definitions of established institutions (school, university, etc.) and their dissolution into hybrid structures; the efficiency of virtual spaces as a parallel world to physical space.

Key person:
Christian Kühn

TU-Wien – Institut für Architektur und Design, Wien (A)

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