100 Ideas for a Performative City

About

“The carnival is the only time of the year when people take off their masks.”
Popular proverb from the UNESCO intangible world heritage Carnival in Barranquilla, 2024

“Organizing a … festival in Salzburg means reviving ancient living traditions in a new way; it means: doing things in a new way in ancient, meaningful … places […].”
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Festspiele in Salzburg, 1921

What is a festival today? Why urbanization, ecologization, and digitalization in architecture? Where should urban transformation be activated?
Urbanthinktank_next (Uttx) celebrates creative processes in contemporary urban design by prioritizing cultural and social aspects over a narrow focus on technical solutions, energy efficiency, style, and aesthetics. The power of architecture is often overlooked when we experience both traditional high culture and emerging popular culture. Events such as the festivals in Salzburg, the carnival in the Caribbean, Burning Man, or popular street markets are as important as the rise of disruptive urban youth cultures such as Reggaeton, Skateistan, parkour, and breakdance performance spaces. It is our aim to discover and transform potential places for spectacles of all scales that can radically transform today’s urban culture, fostering participative placemaking for communal spaces of coexistence.
Students will map, imagine, and design architecture around the perspective of the exceptional and everyday culture of existing and new institutions, and propose alternative spaces for work, life, education, housing, dance, music, and digital performances in daylight and nightlife. We will discuss our proposals with local stakeholders, cultural entrepreneurs, and guests from Salzburg, Berlin, Medellín, Sarajevo, and Singapore. The final exhibition, 100 Ideas for Salzburg, will be presented in the city and, later this year, become part of the ongoing Imagine Democracy project in collaboration with the Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs (bmeia)

Course leader

Urbanthinktank_next

Target group

Architecture

Fee info