The summer academy 2010 will explore the opportunities and challenges of the development of inner city waterfronts comparing the Spree area of Berlin and the East River on the Brooklyn side of New York. We will start on Mai 29th and conclude with an exhibition featuring the works on June 30th. For more information on the various field trips, lectures and site visits check the schedule.

Waterfront sites stir emotions, the proximity to the river’s edge sets off expectations of a more luxurious life. Never the less, the site in Berlin as well as in New York show traces of a time were the water was less the place to life, the river was seen primarily as a conduit for the transport of goods but neglected as a potential site of commerce or residence. Berlin, back then, essentially turned its back to the waterfront. These post-industrial landscapes, forgotten inner cities, and sprawling terrains are the scars of perpetual change cut into the built fabric and serve as proof that modernity is uncompromising in its measure of usefulness, but also unlimited in its ability to reinvent.

Indeed, some of the most exciting architecture and planning of today are those projects that have successfully repurposed old sites for uses completely unimagined even twenty years ago -- urban farms, industrial lofts or suburban cores.

If nothing else, architecture and planning have proven to be recombinant, but the threat of obsolescence remains and weighs even heavier today than before because of the additional ecological imperative. Global warming and limited resources imply that the penalty for failure in architecture and planning is simply too high to risk design without thinking about the future.

Modes of living and working as we know them today will change fundamentally within the lifespan of any newly designed and constructed building. Changing social mores will render entire buildings obsolete and industrial areas, business districts and neighborhoods will vacate and become silent, decrepit monuments to an earlier time. Although the threat of obsolescence has always presented an enormous challenge for architects and planners, today it is an even greater challenge as we attempt to square development with an environmental imperative to be carbon neutral.

The French meteorologist Stephane Hallegatte, translated the last assessment report of the IPCC into a comprehensible picture. For twelve European cities he located cities which do today show the climate expected in 60 or 70 years. Interesting enough for Berlin those cities are located around the Mediterranean, east of Rome or depending on the simulation parameters possibly in Tunisia. The challenge for planers and architects will be to consider those different climate conditions now. Buildings designed for Berlin and likewise at other places in the world need not only to meet the climatic situation at present, those buildings should also function for instance in Italy without considerable modification.

Adaptation and mitigation are the two strategies discussed addressing global warming and the limited fossil resources. Looking at the building stock as well as at strategies to sustainable building we will have to consider lifecycle issues. In Germany for instance the embodied energy of construction of the building stock approximately equals the energy necessary to operate a building over 20 years.

This summer we will investigating  various building typologies and assessing their potential to adjust and retrofit those buildings to accommodate a wide range of programs. The criteria of the selection of those typologies will be connected to existing conditions along the waterfront in Berlin -- warehouses, loft buildings, courtyards and atriums, to list a few. We will use the insertion, recombination and reuse of these elements to design new urban areas that accommodate incremental changes in life styles and working patterns now and into the future.

The imperative to design with the future in mind bears new questions:
• What does it mean to design buildings that have the flexibility to work with the anticipated lifestyle and work patterns of today and those unknown patterns of the future?
• What will the impact be of critical issues such as global warming and limited access to fossil resources in the future?
• How will that impact on the design and quality of the buildings that are being retrofitted and those that will be built to accommodate today’s needs?

Designing a building always relates to the context. Developing an urban quarter goes along with an understanding of an idea about the characteristics of the place. The question in mind is the question related to the image of the urban quarter, does the area keep with the appearance of the industrial site or does it change to a contemporary neighborhood with some industrial artifacts, or will the role of the artifacts be exempt for the new buildings? Will there be a recognizable feature for the neighborhood showing the different tint or does it blend into the existing fabric?

We will study the pattern of development, history, typology and urban fabric of the adjacent districts of Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain, Mitte and Treptow, exploring the relationship of the waterfront and the city with emphasis on the relationship to the people that live and work in the area.

To approach these key issues we will assess present proposals for the area and comparing them to the social, economic and environmental needs, opportunities and potential of the district. This would start with a historical review of the social and built development of the area, including a study of the architectural heritage of the area and comparable areas in Berlin.

This will be followed by an analysis of the informal redevelopment efforts underway since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and how those might be tapped to meet the needs of the area’s diverse population. Integral to this analysis would be the retention to the extent possible of the area’s architectural and cultural heritage, an assessment of the changing nature of work, production and life styles and how these relate to emerging patterns of land use and building typologies.

We will learn about the various planning and development approaches undertaken in Germany ranging from large scale planning initiatives to the IBA approach undertaken in Kreuzberg that led to the incremental revitalization of that community as well as looking at comparable efforts at IBA Emscher Park and other areas in Germany and the European Union.

It was in the early 80ies when building at a waterfront became an issue in Berlin again. There was the IBA Project in Tegel and later after reunification the development of the Rummelsburger Bucht and Wasserstadt Spandau. One of the key issues of those developments was the public access of the waterfront. Typically this meant a sort of landscape treatment and not an urban edge at the water.

Perhaps because of climate and relative land scarcity, mediterranean cities including Venice developed a much more integrated use of the water and organized promenades, shops, cafes and restaurants along water corridors.

Focusing on developments along the Spree will allow us to move from the macro-urban level planning to the micro- building level of urban design and start considering the architectural factors that have made developments successful in the past and will be required to make developments successful in the future.

Applications are now being accepted.