In the pursuit of the most prized commodities of our time – energy and food, our proposal envisions the Lagoon archipelago as prototype for a future metropolitan regional system, adapting existing local knowledge and infrastructure. A new productive landscape, capable of supporting a regional community of small settlements is thought to establish an integrated and environmentally stable system that builds upon existing biodiversity and production.

Within this scenario, the Lagoon becomes a vast working resource in which eco-systems, energy cycles, and human activities energetically and environmentally are self-sustaining. Natural processes, human activity and technology interact, giving opportunity to restore, renew, and reconnect. Connecting to a traditional and locally cast mindset of environmental balance, the Venice lagoon becomes a network of concurrent influences, hence a prototypical “site of relatedness and dialogue“. (Cacciari)

Team: Prof. Klaus Loenhart, Andreas Goritschnig, Christoph Wiesmayr, Christina Kimmerle in cooperation with terrain:loenhart & mayr

‘The competition called on architects and designers to define and apply new spatial approaches in order to create a community that will serve as a model for sustainable living elsewhere on the continent and beyond. At the core of the competition were universally relevant questions: in a globalizing world, how can new spaces come into being that simultaneously acknowledge the creativity of its inhabitants, the abundance and fragility of its natural settings, and the dynamics of urban growth?

The Southbank was an open, two-stage competition that aimed to produce visualisations of a new community for 2000-3000 people, in which residential accommodation merges with internationally significant facilities for arts production and performance, in a setting defined by ecological conservation.‘ [Competition‘s call 2006]

The proposed project points at the segregation in Apartheid’s South Africa, yet with a totally different target: The graphically dominant stripes of the project’s masterplan does not represent the separation of different people and uses, but an openness to the variety of ways of living of the inhabitants. The dwelling offers several models of housing with different densities and building typologies, in order to enhance the mix and combination of the various functions, fabrics, buildings and people.

The concept of a community based living in the proposed project should strengthen the inhabitant’s responsibility for the residential fabric and its many open green spaces. The start up for the plant would be the ‘great garden campaign’, which defines already at the very beginning the grid of the future fabric.

Team [first stage]: Martin Mechs, Uli Tischler, Felicitas Konecny, Wolfgang Isopp, Christina Kimmerle