“Buildings as a material resource – using the example of a temporary lecture hall building”
Based on a comprehensive theoretical basis, Ms. Wollny puts forward the thesis that buildings must be viewed as a material resource from which materials and building materials can be recovered using renewable energies. Using a temporary lecture hall building for the University of Konstanz, it is shown how recyclable construction methods allow the dismantling of components in order to create an inexhaustible cycle.
The work is characterized in particular by the excellent documentation of urban material potentials as well as the detailed planning of construction and dismantling. A convincing energy and mobility concept rounds off the future-oriented project.
Fanny Hirt
Appreciation
“Department store transformation – redefining downtown Heidelberg”
Ms. Hirt’s master thesis deals with the dissolution of the monostructure of department stores and their rehabilitation in the city center using the example of the transformation of a large Heidelberg department store. From a detailed overview of urban developments in the 20th and 21st centuries and a critical examination of the history of department stores, the thesis results that inner-city buildings are not used as monostructures, but should be designed as heterogeneous, diverse and fragmented structures according to the existing needs of the city and the city Quarter.
Clara Süssmann
Prize winner
Clara Süssmann received the main prize for her thesis
“On a treasure hunt in the Black Forest – Clara mine mineral storage facility”.
The master thesis draws its content from a well-thought-out and newly connoted storage term, its regional function and significance as a treasury and identity bearer of a region, as well as its structural location and implementation in the form of a participatory, process-oriented, museum and public building.
The architectural expression of the skilfully and precisely worked through design shows in its different building plastic facets that the desired synthesis of a contemporary and sustainable culture of storage and preservation could lead to a legible and tangible contribution to a rekindled building culture in the Black Forest.
Xu Tiantian opened her own architectural office DnA_Design and Architecture in Beijing in 2003. Since 2014 she has been developing a new strategy of small-scale interventions with the regional administration of Songyang and the local economy, from which the entire spatial area can benefit.
The interventions of DnA strive for an interaction between rural and urban characteristics. The projects are spread across the region like a network of acupuncture. They activate the local economy, strengthen the cultural identity and take care of the environment and community.
“The mallorquine practice TEd’A is a workshop and a studio. They propose to move forward by looking back, without losing sight of the past and tradition; to continue to perfect tradition as an indisputable heritage; to defend regional identities against totalizing uniformity. We prefer evolution to revolution.”
The position and work of TEd’A Arquitectes stands out to mark a cultural position against naïve technophilia. The office has a theoretical base and a body or work that substantiates their approach. The mallorquine practice belong to the generation of architects that has transcended the binary opposition of modernism versus postmodernism.
Without nostalgia, without self-aggrandizing pathos, their work shows how respectful syntheses of contexts are possible everywhere. Standing in line with similar architects who preceded them. TEd’A Arquitectes offer an approach that understands their presence and actions as simultaneously specific in time and opportunities as well as general and transcendent.
