Mountains and Microclimates: architecture for an Alpine city
Andrew Ford (University of North London)
Mark Hewitt (University of North London)
Prof Volker Giencke (Institut für Hochbau und Entwerfen, Innsbruck)
Monika Gogl (Institut für Hochbau und Entwerfen, Innsbruck)
architecture students from London and Innsbruck
Austrian Cultural Institute
10–30 July 1999

The Austrian Cultural Institute hosted an exhibition and symposium about the influence of climate on architecture and urban design. The exhibition was the result of a collaboration between the School of Architecture and Interior Design of the University of North London and the Institut für Hochbau und Entwerfen of the University of Innsbruck. The sensitivity of the Alpine environment offers a way of focusing attention on these issues by looking at the mutual influence of micro-climates and architectural interventions, as well as global issues such as energy consumption, pollution and climate change.
The young designers' work in this exhibtion explored transient and dynamic aspects of the physical world and the influence these have on subjective experience of the immediate environment and on building performance. The models and projects demonstrated thinking at a range of scales. Time scales ranged from the fleeting change in the weather to the annual variation of the seasons and the problems associated with global climate change. Physical scales ranged from the mountaineer's hut to the city and network structures. The underlying approach was to devise methods of dynamically modelling environmental phenomena in the design process in order to reveal the critical meeting points between the natural environment, building technology, the poetic potential of architecture and the people who inhabit it.
The exhibition included a large scale 'topoenergetic' model of a section of the Inn valley, which revealed some of the critical energy flows which have influenced the development of the design work. The shifting solar angles of winter and summer were displayed, and a dynamic 'growth' of the city was traced through shifts in the surface of the model, in addition to active demonstration of the changing ground heat conditions and the pollution condition. These effects, normally invisible in architectural representation, were taken as essential starting points for urban- and building scale proposals.

Energy and Urban Strategies:
a cross disciplinary discussion of the forces that shape cities
read more

click for bigger pictures and captions