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Bachelor Project

At the centre of the Bachelor course is a design project run over the course of a semester. The project, framed within a thematic investigation, is carried out in small groups, each contributing to a wider group study of a given situation. A specific neighbourhood or context is chosen in Munich within which students act on a variety of sites.

The focus is in the design of buildings, interiors and urban spaces from strategic thinking to construction detail. The course encourages a growing sensitivity to the character of the city and how the design of a building engages with the wider character of the urban context.

The Professors are supported by Assistant Claudia Duell-Buchecker and a number of part-time Junior assistants who are practicing architects in the city. Alongside the design project a lecture series is run addressing related themes.

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WS 24/25 – Bachelor Project (7th Sem) The promise of re-use
Live/work in Urbino

‘The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.’ Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

As the construction industry accounts for 40% of energy-related CO2 emissions and significantly impacts our natural habitats, it is incumbent on us to respond in the way we work and approach the making of good buildings. In the circumstances, focusing on adapting the existing building fabric, repairing and reusing it and thereby reducing the number of new buildings seems the most intelligent option. However, sustainability parameters and guidelines generally refer to building anew rather than to adjusting or adapting existing construction. Buildings have a past, embodied energy and a carbon footprint and are unlikely to meet current airtightness and thermal performance requirements. Crucially, existing buildings embody a cultural dimension, a relationship with place and circumstance that is laden with meaning. In addressing the re-use of buildings we cannot ignore the importance of the non-functional, subjective dimension of ‘having been there’, (as Italo Calvino highlights). In this sense architectural values are as relevant as social and cultural principles, and should inform the sustainability agenda..

The term ‘adaptive reuse’, which emerged in the 1970s as a real estate shorthand to indicate the modification of an existing structure to achieve maximal use and economic returns, has found its way into the language of architecture in recent years. Despite the lack of any theoretical underpinning, this broad-brush strategy has become the mantra of developers, institutions, and the media in response to the climate emergency. But while it advocates optimising what we have, it does not provide a coherent framework we can operate in. Like so many statements of intent within the environmental debate, it oversimplifies issues, and its assumptions need to be rigorously examined if they are to be applied effectively. Reuse can mean many things – reconstruction, reinvention, restoration, renovation – each of which has its own consequences and associations and as we strive to make architecture with meaning and value beyond use, to ensure that the buildings we make engage with architectural culture and history in a continuum, it is imperative that we place our work within a conceptual framework.

This semester we shall explore re-use and the adaptation of existing building fabric in the most exotic of locations, Urbino. A world heritage site and birthplace of Bramante and Raphael, Urbino epitomises the Renaissance notion of ambiente, nature and history, landscape and cityscape. Projects will be located in the medieval fabric within the old city walls and the outlying university precincts, developed from the 1960s-70s with the intention of finding strategies for adaptive re-use of the buildings to provide living and working environments. The special qualities of the existing buildings will prompt fresh ideas about living in plan and section, threshold and territory. The project will bring us face to face with two important creative protagonists who each contributed so much to the development of the city, the Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect and military engineer Francesco di Giorgio Martini and Giancarlo de Carlo, core member of Team X from 1956, urban planner of Urbino from 1958, and founder of ILAUD (International Laboratory of Architecture & Urban Design) in 1976. The questions we will ask ourselves, as posed also by Carlo’s 1966 Urbino Plan, are first, can an old form retain its significance when the activities of the city itself have changed radically? And, second, how can a modern architectural form be successfully woven into an older fabric and how can it become a next layer in the continuously evolving city?

Stephen Bates and Bruno Krucker, September 2024

The promise of re-use Live/work in Urbino