Making Mountains



with:
Jakob Sellaoui
Simona Ferrari

participants:
Anja Marjanovic, Thijs Vleeschouwer, Cara Domscheit, Sabrina Sadushi, Jana Kopp

#Vienna Architecture Summer School 2022
#constructedlandscape #goodenougharchitecture #landfill #infrastructure #builtnature      
Photo by Jakob Sellaoui and Simona Ferrari Photo by Jakob Sellaoui and Simona Ferrari Photo by Jakob Sellaoui and Simona Ferrari Photo by Jakob Sellaoui and Simona Ferrari Photo by Jakob Sellaoui and Simona Ferrari Photo by Jakob Sellaoui and Simona Ferrari Image credit: Raisz, 1948. © McGraw-Hill, Inc. Photo by Jakob Sellaoui and Simona Ferrari Photo by Jakob Sellaoui and Simona Ferrari

Our intention is to be good. Good in the sense of morally right. At least that's what we as architects like to say. But to evaluate the extent of our behaviours and buildings in terms of their ecological “righteousness” is in fact a non-linear, complex and nearly impossible task. So now what?

For this very reason we will look at Vienna's landfill aka Deponie Rautenweg aka high-tech waste management facility. Disguised as a natural landscape inhabited by grazing goats, it also is a sophisticated infrastructure and constructed pile of trash that is expected to soon reach a monumental height of 75 meters.

Serving as our specific site of interest it also raises questions about our actions, their consequences and how we as architects can formulate judgements by acknowledging our pretense and accepting the state of good-enough solutions.

The workshop will be process oriented. Our means are simple yet effective. Operating as site-surveyors we will explore the landfills' physicality through photographic and hands-on building methods while simultaneously framed by readings and lectures.


Jakob Sellaoui is an Austrian-american architect who studied at the Technical University of Vienna and the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He is currently a lecturer at the Institute of Architecture and Design at the TU Vienna. Within his architectural practice built projects and theoretical work operate side by side, critically engaging with our contemporary reality. His work has received several awards and grants, including the Austrian Cultural Ministry's Margarethe Schütte-Lihotzky Grant, the MAK Schindler Scholarship in Los Angeles, as well as the Advancement Award in architecture by the City of Vienna.

www.jakobsellaoui.com

Simona Ferrari is based in Zurich and works across architecture, visual arts, and writing. She studied architecture at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, TU Vienna, and the Politecnico di Milano, and Fine Arts at the ZHdK. Since 2017 she has been a teaching and research assistant at the ETH Zurich and was assistant curator of the Japan Pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale (2018). From 2014 to 2017 she worked with Atelier Bow-Wow in Tokyo, completing several international projects, exhibitions, and installations. She is co-founder of the collaborative project Landscape In-Between awarded by Europan in 2019.

www.landscapeinbetween.com