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​​On Friday, 29 November 2024, the Civic Design Conference of the Peter Behrens School of Arts will take place for the fifth time at Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences. This year's theme is "Substance and Transformation" and, together with the Institute for Sustainable Urban Development (In-LUST), we would like to invite you to participate.
 
Cities as we know them cannot survive like this. Planning as we know it must change substantially. Architecture must reinvent itself. While some cities and towns in Germany are growing ever denser and new buildings and neighbourhoods are being planned to meet increasing demands, an astonishing amount of space and built substance remains unused and left to decay. Despite their mineral nature, cities have always been elastic organisms. They are capable of emerging, growing, thriving, exploding, decaying, shrinking, surviving and sometimes dying, often starting all over again. In the long history of architecture, modernism with its impetus of demolition and new construction is a solitary exception. Historically, the new usually emerged from the utilisation of the old, transformation and circularity were the rule, new construction and single-use of building materials the exception.
 
The mass of the built environment that we have accumulated, particularly in the last century, is an enormous resource. We need to ask questions about the existing building stock and its transformation from a cultural, economic, social and ecological perspective. An analysis of the existing building fabric must identify possible points of action and intervention. Existing buildings are not just a reusable stock of building components, but in their presence are an stimulus for further construction and conversion. The permanence and preservation of existing buildings should have top priority over the reuse of components in other locations or even demolition and, at best, the downcycled use of building materials. 
 
From the urban planning scale to the architectural detail, precise knowledge of the existing building is required in order to utilise its potential for resource-saving development. Possible transformations and updates of the existing building stock are dependent on knowledge of typologies, building constructions and material compositions so that architecture can strive from forgotten elastic principles into new horizons. We want to familiarise ourselves with the historical and contemporary discourse on this topic and lead a lively discussion on these issues in our conference. 
 
The aim of our conference is to bring together practising architects and urban planners with students, researchers and teachers as well as actors from city administrations, and to consciously discuss formal-aesthetic issues alongside scientific considerations of circularity (or permanence) and political or pragmatic aspects of realisability. This year's keynote speakers will be Anne Lacaton (Lacaton & Vassal, Paris), 2021 Pritzker Prize winner, Jo Taillieu (jo taillieu architecten, Ghent), Anna Bandke (City of Bergisch Gladbach, Zanders-Areal project group) and a representative of baubüro in situ (Zurich and Basel).
 
An official invitation with a detailed schedule and a complete list of this year's guest speakers will be made available shortly. We look forward to your participation!