About

With the rise of individual mobility in the middle of the last century, urban planning as a discipline was fundamentally neglected. Priority was given instead to traffic planning. The result was the emergence of suburbs and agglomerations along landscape-defining transport infrastructures—sequences of isolated, self-contained individual buildings. Each parcel pursues its own logic, with its own individually sized driveway, parking area, and boundary to the sidewalk. We need to engage in true urban design!

The city of the future. Few topics inspire the imagination more. Some see us living in giant skyscrapers with plants sprouting on the walls and a forest thriving in the middle with an amusement park. Others predict the end of individual mobility and see the use of autonomous shuttle fleets as the solution. This would reduce the need for parking spaces and roads. City dwellers could garden on the freed-up spaces and provide their own food. Whatever comes, one thing is certain: the world’s population has doubled in the last 50 years. The question here is how do we make our cities smart, because it is in the cities that the future will be decided.

Densification with multiple qualities. In this sense, new typologies of densification in the cities are compared and elaborated together. Thus, thanks to the latest digital technologies, all subject areas are combined in one software and additionally compared with bicycle paths, public green spaces, bus stops and parking lots of all city districts, thus the quality of the immediate living space can be verified.

Circular Economy – humanity is facing a building material problem. If we continue to consume building materials in this way, we will soon have serious difficulties. We have to be much more careful with our natural resources. Particularly in the construction sector, this requires good planning for new buildings, focusing on durability from the outset and planning for recycling at the end of the building’s service life. All natural processes on this earth function as a cycle. If we were to develop a closed-loop system in the construction industry, we would no longer need to create landfills.

In addition, we will soon have a lack of material availability. Since 2014, there have been reports from the European Union that we will have worldwide shortages of zinc and copper. Even with sand we have this problem, because meanwhile Germany has started to import the sand from Australia to produce concrete (Prof. Dirk Hebel Karlsruhe). This means that 55% of the total energy consumption of a building is already wasted before it is actually inhabited, and in addition to this, all the climate-damaging emissions have already been dumped into our atmosphere. And now we start and turn the radiator 2°C down, instead of simply developing the walls 10% thinner, which we could do at any time. In this sense, we seem to enjoy too much comfort in our homes and, just to give an example, we probably have too much sound insulation. Even if we could build living rooms with ceilings 16 cm thick, we still build them 32 cm thick. Of course, we do not want to hear our neighbors for three seconds a day.

Our garbage is a design fault. Nowadays, we glue building materials together in such a way that it’s almost impossible to get them apart. In this sense, garbage is a design fault, because we are constantly realizing building elements that we then can no longer bring into a circular architecture with the same quality. Our current built environment has not yet been designed to be reintroduced, so in the future we need a circular economy that begins with careful design. Result: on each of the structural elements used in a building, it could say «I’ve been a house before» or, for example, the sheet metal used on the exterior facade of an office complex has been a church steeple roof before. This is the leitmotif: «Less for more» – Building with less material for more people.