Symposium LEARNING TRANSFORMATION / TRANSFORMING LEARNING

LEARNING TRANSFORMATION / TRANSFORMING LEARNING
Symposium with lectures and discussion by:

CHARLOTTE MALTERRE-BARTHES
ERIK FENSTAD LANGDALEN
INGE VINCK

The symposium, part of a one-year initiative at the TU Wien, brings together three leading international voices in today's architectural discourse to give input lectures on what they consider the most critical issues when dealing with transformation and reuse.

CHARLOTTE MALTERRE-BARTHES: STOP BUILDING TO START CONSTRUCTING
“A Moratorium on New Construction,” an initiative that emerged during the 2020 lockdown, argues that building is a choice of destruction. Structural change to construction protocols in the whole industry is necessary, and until this is sorted, new construction activities should pause.
Drawing from the option studio at the Harvard Graduate School of Design by the same name, a vision for a material future relying on our current built stock emerged, interrogating unchecked narratives, from unrestrained growth to single-family homes typologies, from heteronormative suburbia to tourism infrastructures. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes will discuss how to unlearn the assumption that architects must build new rather than practicing methods of repairing and prolonging as well as the daunting task of teaching not to build.

About Charlotte Malterre-Barthes
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is an architect, urban designer, and Assistant Professor of Architectural and Urban Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Most recently Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Malterre-Barthes’ interests are related to urgent aspects of contemporary urbanization, material extraction, climate emergency, and ecological/social justice. In 2020, she started the initiative ‘A Global Moratorium on New Construction’ interrogating current development protocols. Malterre-Barthes holds a doctoral degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich on the political economy of commodities in the built environment while directing there the MAS Urban Design.

ERIK FENSTAD LANGDALEN: EXPERIMENTAL PRESERVATION PEDAGOGY
In order to meet the challenges facing architectural education in the ear of circularity, we need to scrutinize the premises upon which our discipline operates: we need to rethink our methods, working techniques and terminology, and we need to raise the question of how we evaluate our built heritage. This talk proposes alternative ways of how to activate the past for the future, presenting current research and teaching initiatives from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.

About Erik Fenstad Langdalen
Erik Langdalen arkitektkontor was established in 1999, and has since then gained extensive competence and experience within the fields of architectural preservation, museum architecture, and housing. Over the last five years the office has concentrated its efforts around a number of preservational projects for different private and public clients.
Erik Langdalen is also a professor in preservation at the Oslo school of architecture, he is the author and editor of several books dealing with preservation in architecture, and he owns and runs a cultural centre at the historic Budsjord farm on Dovre.

INGE VINCK: UP-GRADE / DOWN-GRADE / FREE-GRADE
What is up-grade. Is it about more? About better? About high? What is grading? Is it a way of measuring? Is measuring still the way up? Do we have to measure or grade when we are acting? Is grading and norming still an instrument? And if it is; can it just continue to be the instrument as it was or might it need some re-calibration? Questioning grading and measuring and norming seems today to be as good as in urge as the urge of the matter of the world itself. The immediate urge needs immediate act. But the immediate reflection is as a need as the immediate act to give that immediate act a chance to become really a future relevant perspective.
It won’t be changed in a text like today. And it won’t be only by this text. Even not stands this text alone today.
This short writing is to open a first self-reflexion on what one has been aiming or how one has been acting till or even is on at today. Let’s give it a try. And line out some first ideas that come out. Ideas that can be intertwined. Freely and openly. Conflicting and constructively. Really and seemingly. Anyway. Keeping these first ideas rather dynamic that just immediately turning them into undebatable truths or norms. That not at all!

About Inge Vinck
Inge Vinck is a Belgian architect based in Ghent; co-founder with Jan De Vylder of jan de vylder architecten (JDV A - 2007) and architecten de vylder vinck taillieu (A DVVT - 2010) and recently of architecten jan de vylder inge vinck. / inge vinck jan de vylder architecten (A JDVIV / IVJDV A- 2019).
Currently Inge Vinck is professor at the Baukunstklasse of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

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The event is part of the Excite 2022 research programme ‘Reuse in Teaching’ organised by Lorenzo De Chiffre, Artem Kitaev, Eva Mair and Katharina Paschburg from the Institute of Architectural Design (253)
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Image: architecten jan de vylder inge vinck. / inge vinck jan de vylder architecten, CHAPEX6, Restoration of Palais des Expo, Charleroi