SUMMER SEMESTER 2021

We are focusing on the topics of sports, physical activity, and community. The past year has shown us how important it is—for both body and soul—to stay fit. For this reason, we would like to direct the focus of our exploration during the summer semester toward the theme “Body and Space.”

Together with you, we want to design the sports and cultural center of tomorrow—a place where both the individual and the community can take a break from the stresses of everyday life and recharge with strength and energy, not only for the body but also for the soul.

Regardless of whether, in the future, everyone will work from home or in open-plan offices, in a factory, or fly through the World Wide Web via an avatar, the body’s physical needs will remain the same—eating, drinking, and exercise are basic needs, even in the future.

But what might such a place look like? To find out, we’re not just looking to the future—we’re also asking ourselves: “How do we develop prototypical profiles for the different users of our building?” “What does flexibility mean for the program and the architecture?”

In his project *Prometeo*, the Italian composer Luigi Nono integrated space as a compositional parameter. As we know, room acoustics have always played an essential role in the live experience of music and theater, but in Luigi Nono’s experiment, space becomes a performer in its own right.

We find this concept fascinating, and it serves as the starting point for our project “NEXT Theater for the Performing Arts.”

Theaters are fascinating architectural typologies, both in terms of their historical development and their social role. It is important to explore and understand the key elements of what makes a theater a “theater”—the shared experience—in light of the interplay between space, performance, and audience. In this studio, these elements are viewed as individual characters/bodies that subsequently play a collective role in the development of a new theater space for dance, theater, performance, and more.

As a first step, we will examine various concepts of performance, choreography, and narrative using exemplary historical, contemporary, and visionary projects.

We will then explore how these themes relate spatially and conceptually to the “ensemble of actors” (space, audience, and performers) within a theater. We are particularly interested in how movement, sound, spatial sequences, etc., can be translated spatially and atmospherically with the help of design strategies.

The focus here is on “working with all means”—using algorithms and straws, analog and digital tools, as well as their transformation from one medium to another—to design spatial concepts.

We aim to apply these insights to develop forward-looking spatial concepts for the “NEXT Theater of the Performing Arts.”

Semester Schedule:

Analysis and Warm-Up

Translation and Transformation

Localization and Programming

Elaboration and Narrative

It is essential that you have prior knowledge of Rhino 3D and are interested in exploring other software programs.

Participation in the accompanying “Narrative” seminar (3 block sessions) is mandatory.

During the summer semester, part of the tour will once again take place digitally in the cleanroom. If you’re not familiar with the cleanroom from the fall 20/21 semester, check out this video:

(http://studioeug-harnoncourtfuchs.com/Share/Videos/index.html)

In this seminar, we’ll focus on exhibition design and the placement of content from the studios within the cleanroom space.

Step 1: Meeting and introduction to “Unity”

Step 2: Begin communicating with the participating studios. Here, the exhibition content will be analyzed and potential exhibition formats developed.

By the middle of the semester, there should be an initial mockup for the participating studio.

In the final step, the virtual exhibitions will be populated with the content and semester results from the participating studios from the Summer Semester 2021.

With this seminar, we aim to give all projects the opportunity to become more involved in the development and implementation of the virtual exhibition.