SEHSI Summer Workshops

The three workshops in Valencia 2014, Split 2015 and Ljubljana 2016 have been embedded in the European Tempus project SEHSI - “Regional sustainable development on the basis of eco-human synergetic interaction (multidisciplinary training course for MSc, PhD and LLL students in engineering)”, which has been a collaboration between partners from Ukraine, especially Kharkiv, and from EU-countries. Technische Universität Wien, Faculty of Architecture, Department of Urban Design hold the lead in what concerned organization. Together with Kharkiv the contents have been outlined. Our concern was to underline the importance of practical work which was then implemented as workshops in this important and very ambitious program.

The problem of regional sustainable development certainly lies in the complexity of the concerns and in the differences between all kind of matters in each specific case. The goal of the workshops therefore consisted in a comparative research of three very peculiar urban and regional moods which nevertheless turned out to bear in themselves many similarities.
The specific task was to deal with complexity on different levels and in different manners. Against this background the essence of the workshops was a renewed understanding that form would be the key to solve (or dissolve) complex problems. IT-specialists use “architecture” as a semantic synonym for the specific construction of complex software structures or farm-computings - while the major goal of software is process-oriented. At the same time architecture flew into nonformal processive concepts - while the major goal of architecture is in fact the creation of space, light, function and the structured organization of complexity. We think that the experience of the three workshops helped all the participants to return home to this basic quality and competence of architectural and urban design, namely to un- derstand design as a tool to solve complex problems.

One of the qualities of design is its reproducibility in the sense that a drawing defines very accurately an attempt to outline solutions - much closer than many many words. A sketch can be distorted without losing its sense and logic. Words and sentences can easily be converted in order to change their message without losing their mood...

I would like to thank all the participants and those responsible of the SEHSI program and especially to those who organized the three wonderful summer workshops. I think we all did a great step further and I really appreciate that our collaboration continues.

Christoph Luchsinger, Department of Urban Design, Technische Universität Wien