Best laid plans:

From obsolescence to radical resilience!

“The best-laid plans of mice and men, often go awry”

Robert Burns

The high street department store as a retail concept is largely a thing of the past. These shuttered behemoths with their closed facades, endless floor plates and windowless spaces litter the urban landscape all over the world, their derelict obsolescence further sucking the lifeblood out of formerly vibrant inner city streets. These monofunctional architectures stand as empty monuments to ideas, social concepts and commercial goals of the past. They are symbols of failure and decline and, to a large part, monuments to the hubris of planners, corporate developers and architects who for many years equated the size of a commercial development with the improvement of the public good.

In the studio, we will study and reimagine one of these structures. This reimagining will be based on a thorough study of both concrete and abstract concepts of vital dialectic relationships such as obsolescence and longevity, permanence and impermanence, public and private realms. We will analyze the historic development of this type of retail architecture and the very concept of the “department store”.

We will analyze the urban context of our chosen site historically on the typological and the urban scale as well as on the sociopolitical level.

One of the central parts of our thesis will be centered around materiality and the various concepts of sustainability, permanence, entropic values and functionality. We will research and propose intelligent and low-tech ventilation and lighting solutions: As these structures with their deep floor plans are possessed of no natural lighting and are usually mechanically lit, ventilated and air-conditioned, proposing alternative spaces engenders not only a deep study of the spatial requirements, but also of current trend in cutting-edge low-tech solutions.

We will undertake all this research together on a broad and knowledge-driven fact-finding research semester, centered around a project site in the center of Berlin (tba).

You will be asked to develop an individual program based on your research. There are no set requirements, the program will be entirely dependant on your research! We will be looking for ideas that encapsulate not only functional programs, but comprehensive and visionary solutions that broadly address the urgent social and urban questions of your time and your future. What is the urbanity the next generation will shape?

Studio Bundschuh is always about public space and the continuation of the urban scale in the architectural realm, about narrative concepts in combination with rigorous contextual analysis, about specificity and about the search for the poetic over the utilitarian.

Our studio will be strongly focused on drawing, model building and spatial experimentation. Group discussions and knowledge sharing are an integral part of our studio culture. Guest critics and lectures from the arts, commercial real estate development and city planning departments will give us input and share their insights throughout the two semesters.

We will undertake two excursions. The first in the WS will be short and to a fairly close destination, the second in the SS a little longer and in-depth. Both destinations to be discussed in studio. Of course, we will also visit the site and similar projects in addition to the “official” excursions!