Entwurfsprojekte

Salzburg is located in the center of Europe, at the border with Germany, a country with which it maintains extremely important economic and cultural relations. Because of its history and its original architecture, the city  (which was home to exceptional cultural figures from, among others, composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to novelist Thomas Bernhard) is visited by millions of tourists from all over the world and is universally known as the  European capital of music (for example, the prestigious Salzburger Festspiele comes to mind). But Salzburg does not live only from the splendor of its past – at the same time, it is a reality that is a main player of  modernity in terms of economic growth, cultural production, dynamism in social relationships. It is precisely this double character, dialectically suspended between past and present, sociocultural tradition and innovation,  which the Salzburg 2017 diploma wishes to explore by working on fifteen areas situated within the strategic zones of the city. That “city of parts” of which Aldo Rossi spoke is an idea which is perfectly adapted to Salzburg  where, thanks to a morphology and an extremely interesting urban topography, dissimilar parts of the city manage to connect with each other, becoming precisely a “city” in spite of planning and language approaches that are distant from each other.

This year‘s diploma also differs from others before it by the choice to not assign preestablished programs to the studios. With this choice, the contemporary, responsible, and curious architect is acknowledged with resolving the problems of a city, the ability to formulate answers to issues that have surfaced from the analytical and exploratory phase, without conditioning him or her a priori with programmatic directions that run the risk of turning out to be anachronistic precisely in light of the results of research. Rather, there will be certain key words, tied to a dimension of Stimmung (atmosphere) the way Adolf Loos intended this idea, which will accompany the experiment of the 2017 diploma Salzburg – Between Memory and Contemporaneity. The final results of the work will be exhibited in the autumn of 2017 at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg as the second act to an exhibition of contemporary art that was inaugurated in July 2016 under the title Anti:modern, and it will be accompanied by a variety of meetings and public discussions.