The City as a Construction Site

Luis Feduchi has been appointed Roland Rainer Chair 2010/11 at the IKA.

Under the umbrella title of The City as a Construction Site , his opening lecture will touch upon a view on the city that is recurrent not only in his research and teaching, but also in his architectural and urban design practice ˆan all-embracing approach which has a lot in common with that of Roland Rainer, concerned as it is with issues ranging from history to ecology, from landscape to construction.

Feduchi, born in 1965, is a practicing architect. His office, founded in Madrid in 1993 and based in Berlin since 2005 has won various awards and competitions, such as the design of the Carmen del Negro Historic Archives of Granada currently under construction. He was Chair of Urban Design at the TU Berlin from 2006 to 2008 and has taught architectural design at various schools such as Penn School of Design, the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio, the AA School of Architecture, London, the ESARQ in Barcelona and the University of Granada. He has lectured recently at the TU Delft, Bauhaus Universität Weimar, the Lebanese American University in Beirut and the University of Queensland in Brisbane. He is currently writing a book entitled „Cities Made, Unmade, Remade. Geographical, Geometrical and Architectural Approaches to the Construction of the City“, based on his PhD research, to be published by Random House / Mondadori.

The Roland Rainer Chair financed by the City of Vienna for 3 years, aims at embedding and further developing Roland Rainer's notion of architecture in the study programs of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, reflecting his way of teaching as well as the consequences of his work and his awareness of responsibility in architecture. It should consider the social, political and ecological perspectives beyond the question of pure design. The Roland-Rainer-Chair should maintain a productive dialogue with the Vienna Departments of City Planning and the professional and research communities concerned with Urbanism.

Built and Un-built Utopias - The Politics of Conversions

Modernism has produced some of the largest single buildings of our times.

Today architects continue to speak of their achievements in terms of size and square meters. City developments are measured in hectares and acres, when concerning emerging economies even in square kilometres.

Le Corbusier's allegorical ocean liner became the normative and even litteral reference in many debates on the city and its architecture. Megastructures, as autonomous systems of dense living, working and existence became the basis of many architectural theses. The metabolists, the archigram group, the situationists and many other thinkers/architects such as Rossi and perhaps to the present time Koolhaas have described through various models the potential of projecting in cities.

The lecture series Built and Un-built Utopias will explore the Modernist belief in architecture's capacity to absorb the city scale. It will do so by presenting various speakers who are addressing the issue from different foci. Architects re-formulating Modernism's legacy, filmmakers documenting its failure and success, academics re-thinking city scale architecture, landscape architects re-generating abandoned and dilapidated infrastructures.

The Academy of Fine Arts, Institute for Art and Architecture will throughout the 2010-11 academic year debate and suggest new ideas in order torevisit the cultural heritage of modernism, its Built and Un-built Utopias.