Power Plant City investigates new urban planning parameters and strategies for urban models based on energy. New techniques towards a better energy performance and new solutions utilizing renewable energy sources are key for securing a sustainable future. With buildings being responsible for the largest part of energy consumption, the built environment has the greatest potential for providing solutions. Energy therefore emerges as a new paradigm for city planning. The city will become its own power plant, utilizing natural resources such as the sun, wind, water and the earth.
A new course will start in November 2012 / the program will be announced in June.
> Application open for November 2012
Wolf D. Prix / Karolin Schmidbaur, Andrea Börner, Reiner Zettl
Guests and visiting Professors: Brian Cody, Bernhard Sommer
„Power Plant City“ is a teaching - and research-program, based on the assumption that the active and passive energy balance towards a sustainable metabolism has become one of the most important criteria for urban development and architecture.
Ecological parameters like climate, humidity and temperature inside and outside, wind, CO2 emissions as well as the material inherent so-called „grey energy“ now carry more and more weight in planning activities. We put forth that ecological sustainability must be active (in addition to and as opposed to passive), which means that we need not only save energy, but proactively find ways to generate energy naturally – utilizing sources like sun, water and wind.
Power Plant City is implementing decentralisation of urban infrastructure, especially new interfaces between buildings and urban structures: a set of collectors and elements of / for storage, flows, distribution, which all include metaphorical, functional, technical and formal dimensions. From now on it is to be expected that cities – existing urban structures as well as new developments – will look very different in a wider sense. The manifold determinants of city planning and the interdependency of their intrinsic urban forces require a new integrative modeling of new, robust urban structures. The planning parameters relevant to be studied are block sizes, diversity, geometry and patterns; street orientation, width and layout; building heights; thermal mass storage; vegetation, water bodies and green belts and their ratio and integration within built structures; density and ground coverage ratios of built to non-built, façade orientation and façade depth. Existing or “found” factors such as climate zones, specific geological and geographic features, as well as studies of vernacular (energy intelligent) architecture in different climate zones are parts of analysis and determinants of design.
Scales of research and programming will be: the region, city-structures, architecture and urban elements, interfaces, nodes (Knoten) and the shift between these scales. The out-coming urban patterns and prototypes should include flexibility and the potentials for self-organisation as well. In order to develop planning strategies, which are generally meaningful, rather than specifically only for one location, comparative case studies for sites in distinct climate zones will be developed.
Power Plant City offers a platform for updating knowledge in the most relevant issues, individual research and the development of counter-intuitive approaches in urban design solutions (thesis / diploma).
Teaching and practice will include software for modelling, simulation, scenario development, methods of cooperative and strategic urbanism and parametric design to analyse, re-configure and visualise urban patterns and forms, in relation to all now available data-bases. The challenge is a interactive network of human and non-human (agents) actors within urban systems and spaces, transgressing the out-dated separation of nature versus technology, local versus global, science versus arts, - following and describing the lines / paths of all the new (and old) hybrids and quasi-objects.
