Vortrag: Eine Haltung im Weltraum | Vera Bühlmann

Lecture by Vera Bühlmann
Eine Haltung im Weltraum – On the Brink or At the Edge (of the World)?
In the frame of the Module Emerging Fields in Architecture (++), HB2, TU Wien
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How to think a notion of "place" when no assumption in particular regarding how to conceive of "space" is departed from? The ancient tradition of natural philosophy conceived of "places" (topos, topoi) in situative and elemental manner – as the place where the four (or five) elements of water, fire, earth and air (and quintessence or ether) converge in each "thing". Aristotle, for that reason, thought of "place" as "amphora" – as containers that "bear" or "carry" mythic mixtures of vertical voluminosity and horizontal planarity. Such ancient motives have a revival today in both contemporary philology and in feminist philosophy, where diverse branches of new materialisms refuse the dogmatic distinction between form and matter, and instead depart from the irreducibly mixed or "intertwined" nature of these classical notions.

The talk will introduce into these tropes and explore how they might lend themselves for a kind of "world-making" that takes perhaps a "u-topian" stance, but also seeks to act responsibly with respect to the global scale of our current crisis – climate, food, territory. I will suggest we can think of this as a stance in the out-with of the world (eine Haltung im Weltraum).

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The module Emerging Fields in Architecture imparts current knowledge from new research fields in architectural and engineering disciplines, with the aim of dealing with current and future design challenges in a broader social context in an interdisciplinary and fundamental way. The lectures impart knowledge about different and interdisciplinary approaches to design, current developments and results of material and construction research, about planning and building under/in extreme conditions as well as about structures that change or develop due to changing parameters.

In this context, strategies for design (from the initial idea to implementation) are questioned in an interdisciplinary discourse, and the question of how the path from idea to realisation can be shaped and to what extent it is possible to be systematically creative is explored. In the practical part, an independent cross-thematic examination is to be carried out.