BUILDINGS IN TRANSFORMATION.
I often find myself thinking about the city and how it is constantly changing. On buildings in transformation, conditions that change, and also take a starting point in the existing. I think this is important. How the existing environment and the social life that exists on the site today, can be part of a process of transformation.
I read in the book Urban Catalyst: The Power of the Temporary Use (2013), that in Vienna, they have a program called einfach-mehrfach. It is an initiative in which city planners and policy makers works to enable projects based in the existing environment, and take advantage of it by seeing it as a resource (Oswalt et al 2013:53).
In another book, called Architecture Depends (2009), Jeremy Till writes about how architects often try to free themselves from the unknown, like the environment and the people. Preferably starting with a clean slate. In the book he also writes about the architects attempt to imagine architecture as eternal and independent, but that is to ignore reality and relinquish responsibility. One should in the creation of architecture realize that there is an interaction with humans, taking the existing environment into account. (Tip of a book worth reading!)
Fluc_2 is a building located in Praterstern in Vienna's city center. Here they have taken advantage of an old underground tunnel, and transformed it into a nightclub and some sort of a cultural center. Klaus Stattmann, the responsible architect, said in an interview I read; that participation and recycling is the project's architectural foundation. He wanted it to look like as if the project never will be finished, in order to give the feeling that the building can continue to develop. This, I think he succeeded with, merely because of the design of the structure; where you constantly can merge more buildings onto the existing one, to get the structure to continue to grow. It can thus be adapted to the contingencies that time can throw against it in the future.
I think it's nice, how to not let themselves be hampered by the time and the existing, that they never saw it as a problem. They took into account the existing environment and tried to create a meaningful solution. One should take responsibility, and already in the planning of the development and design process plan for what may happen in the future. That you as an architect or planner; does not see it as a finished item, but as an evolving one. I think the buildings thereby become more sustainable in the long run.
Fluc_2 lives on today, even though it once was built for something else, they are now being used with a new content. They could have demolished the building to get a fresh start, an empty land to build something new on. Instead, they took account of the history, preserved the building and let it live on in a new context. The value that is retained, are linked to the history and preserves the memories that create continuity in a buildings story.
Moreover Stattmann had people in mind, he saw the importance of including the future users. If conversations had not been made with the users of the site, and if the architect had not seen the possibilities in the social context; the building would probably never become the club that it is today.
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