How can architecture act in the terrain vague without becoming an aggressive instrument of power and abstract reason? Undoubtedly, through attention to continuity: not the continuity of the planned, efficient, and legitimated city but of the flows, the energies, the rhythms established by the passing of time and the loss of limits.

Ignasi de Sola-Morales, ‘Terrain Vague’, 1995

City and landscape were once categorically kept separate. However, both have long since changed dramatically. It’s hard to tell anymore which is which. The modernist urban landscape, promising a better life, has not only produced a substantial part of today’s varied and heterogenous urban texture, but it has also extended the city into and beyond its surrounding areas. The relationship of city and landscape is shifting and is not necessarily antagonistic any longer; it’s not landscape versus city anymore. Here’s a functional opportunity: landscape used as a tool for understanding the conceptual relationship and concrete reality between people and their urban environment. The landscape spaces have their own, individual temporalities. Beyond a classic, spatial typology such as park, garden, forests or bodies of water, open spaces play an immensely important urban role as a structural time element: as archive, storage and material. Essentially, its chronological layers run concurrently: past (functional) roles, present states (of intentional and non-intentional attributions), and the expectations (or promises) of future uses. Design work on a specific project site therefore constitutes research of physical structures, as well as of temporal and natural dynamics at the same time. Beyond the initially abstract realm of landscape, it is essential to tap yet another stratum: tangibility, sensibility and sensuousness facilitate reading, communication, and representation of a project space.

Given the necessary spatial immediacy, the studio will focus on the role of open space in the urban texture of Vienna. Individual projects focusing on concise site intervention will aim to address and expand on its processual aspect and serve as tools for research and understanding – and communicating the findings and speculations to the history and future of the sites in question. How can a process initiate a new time span, interact with those already in existence or activate those lying dormant?

Together, the projects of this studio will constitute an Atlas of Urban Temporalities in Vienna, thereby reflecting, on a larger scale, the city’s actual relationship with nature.