The Academy of the Arts Vienna organises a Hands On Lecture Series:

As practitioners, the ways we act in urban space and that we act with urban space is undergoing critical revision. While our cities are in multiple crisis, future form and function of the urban habitat can only be a speculation. We cannot know well what lies ahead, yet urban adaptation is of paramount importance. The parameters of what forms the city are dynamic, the urban landscape is essentially fluid, as is nature itself. In recent decades landscape architects and urbanist have challenged standard practices in planning and constructing by developing alternative approaches to creating spaces. Respective projects are employing a more careful view regarding existing structures, integrating rather than untangling the complex relationships with the past, present and future. Drawing from the underlying fact that any urban landscape will be a development from and of, rather than a creation ex novo, such reasoning might be adequate to the dynamic and necessarily experimental re-fitting of the habitats of our cities. Learning while doing, rewriting the brief, using tools of participation and collaboration, working with experts of other fields, as well as hands-on engagement with the site and taking responsibility for the future project and its potential uses, are gaining importance as ways of finding agency.

The lecture series focuses on European landscape architecture and urbanistic practices, adjoining critical and theoretical voices for contextualization and speculation on future acting.

Curated by Thilo Folkerts and Christina Condak

Lectures in Winter Semester 2025/26

20.10.2025 — Daniel Ganz, Zurich
03.11.2025 — Matthew Gandy – [ outside of series : Otto Wagner Lecture ]
24.11.2025 — atelier le balto, Berlin
01.12.2025 — Ruderal, Tblissi
12.01.2026 — Françoise Fromonot, Paris

Lectures take place:
at IKA R211a
Schillerplatz
at 7 pm