Counterintuitive Building Types

The research project "Counterintuitive Building Types" investigates whether the considerable material and infrastructural resources of purpose-built retail spaces of the last decades - more than 13 million m2 of retail space in Austria - could also be developed in a more ecologically and economically sustainable way, not least because the stationary retail trade - aggravated by the pandemic - is continuously losing economic traction. Buildings and construction processes cause about 40% of all CO2 emissions and can therefore make a significant contribution to tackling the biggest problems of our time - climate collapse and loss of biodiversity. This requires multiple paradigm shifts, which this project addresses in a little-researched segment of the planning and real estate sector: the countless retail, retail park, and commercial properties that have been built in recent decades (primarily on "greenfield" sites) and connected to motorized individual transport. Could remodeling and rebuilding these building stocks integrate more circular approaches? Even if for most of these sealed mortgages of failed spatial and municipal planning only demolition, recycling and renaturation seem reasonable, this project nevertheless wants to develop scenarios based on selected properties that build on these material stock resources and infrastructure connections and think them towards more sustainably positive energy, use, life cycle and social balances. Through space and use multiplication, the properties will be expanded to include municipal, logistical, sports, and recreational programs, i.e., structurally redesigned and upgraded, using state-of-the-art technologies. This project will develop potential building and energy solutions for the carbon-neutral city based on these underperforming building stock of recent decades. Existing buildings, conversions, and additions will be designed, modeled, and computationally verified as an integrated and combined system for climate-neutral buildings and neighborhoods. The project connects key sustainability goals by building on extensive existing resources, converting and extending them into more socially valuable "third places" in designs, and providing them with key data on cost, energy, and sustainability.